some dissociative aspect of the self

Everything in life can be, at one point or another, so damned tricky, especially romantic love.

I don't think I have ever loved anybody; I have loved dissociative aspects of my Self.  I don't love myself very well. I am dissociated, too much of the time, from my own resplendant wonderfulness. When I have loved men, I haven't seen them. I see my projections of my own fineness, my own adorable Self.

Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream is about loving dissociative aspects of one's Self. He nailed the absurdity and the experience of the daffy dissociative.

Another play in which Shakespeare brilliantly presented dissociative love is Twelfth Night, a play also full of human absurdity misinterpreted as love by some characters and by annoyance in other characters.  Twelfth Night is no Midsummer's Dream, in my opinion. Someone once suggested, declaratively, as if his read of Twelfth Night was definitive, that Twelfth Night is about confusing love and power.  After he told me that, I pored over the play and rewatched any movie version of the play I could get my hands on.  I think power is just one dissociative projection some of the characters exhibit in Twelfth Night but I think he got it all wrong and this mistake should have signaled some valuable insights into who he is.  Twelfth Night would appeal to more males than Midsummer's Dream would appeal to those males. Twelfth Night paints the experience of falling in love, both with real people and with dissociative aspects of the self, more seriously but, in my final analysis, both plays are about the sometimes (frequent?) dissociative nature of romantic love.

How to stop? How to change? Is it like getting to Carnegie Hall, needing practice practice practice? Well, at age 62, not thin and not rich, it's not like men are falling over themselves to get a shot with me. I don't get practice.

In a recent conversation with a good friend, after she had told me something about her romantic love interest that troubled her, I heard myself saying "He might be unconscious when he does this and if he is unconscious, I don't think there is anything you can do. The work of love really steps up to challenge us precisely in those moments when our beloved, or our projection of our beloved, challenges our ability to love them around all impediments.

And that last line brings me to a place I can stop:  Sonnet 116. Sonnet 116 is one of Shakespeare's best known love poems. It's the one where he writes 'in a marriage of true minds'. Could he mean that minds are true when consciously awake?  My favorite part of Sonnet 116 is where it says loving another around all impediments is Love.

So far, I have not encountered anyone who loves me around the impediment of being an imperfect human.  Yet the problem could very well be that I confuse dissociative projective love with conscious love that allows me to see the object of my love in clear consciousness.

Sigh.

Gobbledegook? Or just more dissociative projections?!