Spider Love

There is one word in the book excerpt in my last post that I want to explore more. Possessiveness. Especially as it relates to relationships. It’s an idea that has been coming up and presenting itself lately through different conversations, email exchanges and things I’ve been reading. The idea first presented itself to me exactly two years ago when I read this article by Martha Beck. She refers to this possessive type of love as spider love. It’s more about capturing and binding the object of our affection. Some may literally do that, but I think we sometimes are blinded to ways that we do seek to possess and bind others not so literally, but more emotionally. Obviously, not a very expansive or fulfilling way to love.

I’ve heard the opposite of spider love described as “desire without attachment”. I also recently read this article on marriage and it called this same idea “spaces between togetherness”. When I was using Google to try and find the article, I found this great quote by Kahlil Gibran: “But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.”

I thought I might try my hand at describing this same concept. Be forewarned though: mine won’t be a concise, well written description that evokes beautiful imagery. It will be long and clunky. Deal.

I think the tricky thing about relationships is that we are always trying to label and define them. Brother, sister, mom, dad, best friend, acquaintance, coworker, spouse, lover, etc. We all have an idea in our heads of what a person in any one of the listed roles should be. We have unwritten rules about how different relationships should work and what we think we can expect from them. We like to have all of this well defined for us so that we can go on cruise control and settle in to start receiving the benefits we think are coming our way based on the unwritten rules and beliefs we have about relationships.

Because we call someone best friend, we try to trap that someone into our idea of what a best friend is. Maybe we think it gives us rights to know everything about that person and that they should know everything about me. Problems arise when the other person has a different definition of what a best friend is. Sometimes friendships get deadlocked or caught up in the struggle between the two parties trying to get the other side to conform to his or her idea of the role the other should be playing. Sometimes that struggle is one sided. Either way though, it can be frustrating. We end up forming bonds of anguish instead of bonds of love. We also end up limiting the possibilities of our relationships and where they can go and what they can do for us.

I’ve found that my most rewarding and enriching relationships are those where, instead of trying to settle into a defined role, I allow the relationship to remain suspended in the unknown. I allow the other person to be. I let them define who they want to be and how they want to interact with me. I also try not to assign meaning to shifting and evolving relationships. During times of shifting, the temptation might be to more rigidly adhere to our unwritten rules of relationships as a desperate attempt to hold on to what we think is slipping away. As a result, we unwittingly limit where the relationship can go and the ways that it can teach and feed us.

So yeah. Possessiveness. It’s not good.