THOSE WHO BELONG TOGETHER
„People need not be glued together when they belong together.“ These were the parting words of Sigmund Freud to Theodor Reik on their parting in Vienna. But they ought to be the words of all those who love each other on parting‑‑ of two beings so secure in their own existence and in each other’s affections that departures become acts of affirmation rather than severance, ways in which the world’s terrain grows wider rather than affections being jeopardized and constricted.
But the Augustinian definition („Love means: I want you to be„) is usually constricted by the sayer’s own insecurity as to his/her being into „Love means: I want you to be here.“ So if you (the beloved) are here, I cannot exist fully because I so profoundly need your approval (i.e. I change the contours of my being to „earn“ your affections); if you are gone, I am even more in jeopardy, existing as I do only in your eyes.
But genuine love, to a certain extent at least, thrives on separation and distance, those twin affirmations of the fact that it is not gaze and touch, but resonance of spirit, that binds… that we are capable of being „held“ by much more than arms and legs, impassioned much more deeply than by mere embodied‑ness.
Separated, true lovers resonate across distance like a pair of sympathetically tuned strings; united, lovers bound only by the glue of their insecurities mute one another’s dissonant natural music. And which would youprefer‑‑ you who are about to kiss your lover good‑bye at separation’s threshhold‑‑ the embellishments of a freely‑chosen separation, or the dark terror of a bond held together only by the resins of emptiness.