The nature of love is full of freedom, regardless of the outside voice that advocates for protecting oneself from the suffering of love. For one’s inner self, it’s like an open map to explore. Freedom in love is like the boundless sea—beautiful, dangerous, and irresistible, stirring both curiosity and fear.
Human beings are naturally endowed with the ability or desire to love. And such a feeling is the strongest feeling, in which people are unable to ignore it. Even if ignored, it resurfaces persistently, often as a trauma; hence, emotion must come first.
Holding a view to practice autonomy through repetitive practice, putting emotion as the first, allowing it, listening to the inner voice, then using the rational system as a filter for the negative feelings to know oneself well.
Love fully allows people to practice and explore such self-autonomy. However, it’s like a Journey to the West; there are lots of difficulties, allure, and confusion, and people rarely take the journey again and again. Some of them abandon it and embrace a profession, some of them settle down with “suitable”, and some of them keep escaping to the next journey.
Some are trying to control it, offering or seeking tips to gain love or abandon it — all of them aim to fulfill one’s current need — escape suffering. If there is such conscious control, there is no autonomy. The best control is to allow it to flow. This means that the confidence lies in one’s self-autonomy.
A limited space offers controllable safety; unfortunately, love doesn’t offer such privilege to anyone. Relationships built on selective backgrounds offer a safety as a boundary; however, that’s not what we're talking about. That’s not natural, real love; that’s a deal for some mutual interests.
Therefore, love itself is actually not scary. What makes it scary is the boundless — not only one’s limitation, but also another person’s reaction. However, the other, serving as a mirror, reflects everything that one tries to escape.
Love is like watering. Enough watering stimulates plant growth, while a lack of or excessive watering can cause plants to die. Then, how much is enough? It’s a challenge, because the one you love at present is a variable; the only reference is your experience, which means that love is an absolute empirical research, based on “failures” one by one, within the same people, or with different people, over time.
Followed by, there is a vitally important but easily ignored issue: how much water can you afford? Here we come to a most challenging point, where the scary will be. It’s all about limitation. Borrowed from economics, a very basic principle, when expenses exceed savings, it’s a debt. If one continues, what will support debt is everything you have in your life; it might be wealth or health.
When desire exceeds limitation, to keep yourself full, lower the desire, or expand the limitation. What makes them different is that the changing object is different.
For the one who lowers their desire, it will be transferred to another person, either in a short time or a long time. They won’t realize their own problem — their limitation is not enough to afford what they want. Then, it will easily lead to repetitive unrequited love, or a sense of repetitive emptiness in relationships.
For the latter, only a rare few will choose to expand the limitation, which means to improve themselves, requiring bearing more huge pain on themselves, to grow. This road doesn’t mean that they are continuing with the same people, but it means that they don’t compromise their beliefs in love. However, if the other person holds the same belief and action, then there is a rare true love.
No matter what one chooses, inner conflicts are everywhere. However, as long as one accepts the choice, they will be satisfied in general, which is a rare case. Mostly, there are several conflicts that easily happen.
On “how much is enough to water”, there is a trap. The line is almost invisible, and it can only be estimated through repeated conflicts. On “how much you can afford”, there is another trap. The line is also invisible, and it can only be sensed by a severe clash. It’s like drunk. Only when one has experienced a complete drunk does one know where their limitation is.
To this point, a “failure” is not something bad. The horrible thing is that if one constantly escapes to see themselves, blaming others for the problem, then the sense of imbalance will ultimately kill them. No matter what kind of conflicts, there is a fact that everyone has their own problems, which means mutual triggering.
However, if they are capable of seeing themselves, then another magic of love happens — when the one accepts what reflects from the mirror, and inner seeking, they have the ability that is stimulated by love to overcome those infinitely approaching autonomy, like the Limit of a function in math, through repetitive practice.