California dreaming: What it means to love - ourselves - and others

Like a snake shedding off its skin, society seems to be finally shedding off rusty notions of love that it has been fed over the years via culture. Notions like "the one", or of great love being painful or unrequited, or homogeneous "happily ever afters", and so on, that movies and songs and books brainwashed us with. We are after all, in a hyperconnected age, the age of Tinder where social behaviour like ghosting and, as The New York Times recently taught me, orbiting are prevalent. Sadly, these also reflect what I see in the young people I know - an inability to be completely and consistently vulnerable with another person, whether in friendships or in romantic relationships.

Several of my younger, single friends are living out ironies. On one hand they are more jaded than ever before with love, preferring to be by themselves, with protective emotional armour. On the other hand, they simultaneously long for deeply fulfilling relationships.

This painful dichotomy is understandable. Nobody wants to get hurt. But armour belongs in a battlefield. Relationships are a place to come home to and lay down our defences. So, ultimately such protection is most detrimental to ourselves.


To love something or someone is to include something or someone as a part of us. To love means to be in deep appreciation of the person. It would be stingy and wrong to apply this only to romantic love. This is true of deep friendships, love for children, parents, pets, and so on.

In all of them, the most basic ingredient is intimacy, which is now increasingly being broken down as 'In-to-Me-See'. Are we able to fully see into ourselves? Are we able to fully hear ourselves? Are we able to be completely present with ourselves? Most of all, are we able to do so unconditionally when it is most uncomfortable and inconvenient? Or do we escape into coping mechanisms and distractions like movies, exercise, music, work, dancing, food, alcohol, reading, socializing? How well do we know ourselves? Do we know ourselves, even half as well as others do?

Our outer relationships are a reflection of the most important relationship, the only one that lasts forever, the inner relationship that we have with ourselves.

In this age where perfection is worshipped, being the best at everything is idolized and flaunted on platforms like Instagram it is harder than ever to accept the parts that we dislike about ourselves and that we tend to repress. These are what the psychiatrist Carl Jung called shadows. 'In-to-me-see' means being fully present with these parts, accepting and loving them like the parts you're proud of. In fact, often people that we dislike are merely reflecting shadow parts of ourselves that we have disowned. For instance, an outgoing left-brained person who is obsessed with logic and knowledge might have rejected the intuitive, free-flowing, creative and spiritual part of himself and is therefore triggered by these shadow aspects of himself. (An example of this appears in my previous column on what a troll taught me about kindness and empathy.)

Quite often, the kind of person one is attracted to or admires reflects these parts that the person has suppressed in himself. This is why they say opposites attract, though the only polarities are in fact, our own repressed fragments. An outgoing, adventurous, competitive go-getter woman might be attracted to her opposite archetype, a patient, calm, gentle, nurturing man who represents all that she has suppressed in herself. Someone obsessed with being productive and hard work might have a partner who is all about being relaxed and doing little.

This happens in childhood when we subconsciously disown parts of ourselves that don't match the definition of being "good". It also reflects in how we split our perception of our primary caregivers and parents into "good" (loving, approving) and "bad" (disapproving, strict, angry) parts. When we grow up, unless we are aware of our suppressed parts, the people we will be attracted to, "have chemistry" with, get along with, will often be a rehash of what the brain recognizes as being familiar.

If we listen carefully, we'll discover that every unhappy moment in our relationships has been calling us to realise our own totality.

Simply becoming aware of and integrating our shadows through unconditional acceptance completely changes all of our relationships as well as brings in truly fulfilling new ones. By fully accepting ourselves, we automatically become more accepting of the traits in our partners that annoy us. Fulfilled in our own wholeness, we are able to love them fully as well. Perhaps in the same way as Jane Austen said, "I have no notion of loving people by halves."

* The author is a San Francisco-based writer, journalist, vegan cook, energy healer and meditation coach. She is the co-author of 'Nawazuddin Siddiqui: An Ordinary Life' and a former foreign correspondent with The Economic Times. 'The Phoenix', her new book on childhood will be published by Bloomsbury this year. She can be reached on Twitter @ReadRituparna.