Love is a ‘secret world.’

I love this description and what it brings to my imagination. Committed lovers live in a world that is their secret, private realm. Of course, the lovers, alone and together, move through the world and are observed by others. Other people, like family members, may know their goings-on in exquisite detail. But, this fact is beside the point because lovers inhabit a world that is uniquely, unrepeatably their own and not fully shared with anyone else.

This is so because their ‘world’ is not the earth nor a location or place on it, nor does it refer to any ‘furniture’ of a world – all the objects and people in it. World does have this concrete and material aspect – that of the environment and the community – but it is much more than that. World is first and foremost the entire network of meanings that are to varying degrees shared with other people. So, two lovers live in a world partly shared with others but partly fully and exclusively their own. And not only their own but one they conjured up and built together.

Being a couple that shares a world between themselves is hard enough to attain and harder still to maintain over the years and decades. Is it worth the effort, the hardship, the self-denial, and the frequent heartache to strive for this shared world? I believe so. All too often this couplehood of the couple is never fully arrived at or, if it is, is it held together over the long term. I understand this and what I write about today is my very small contribution to helping you arrive at or hold up your shared, secret world with your significant other.

To succeed in a long-term relationship requires skill and grace, the ongoing comportment of cherishing the other, and the commitment to doing the work required to uphold both members of the couple in their daily lives. I covered this partly in last week’s post.

But another part that can help the couple succeed in their couplehood is to feel, to conjure, and to build up this secret, enchanted world, one not fully shared with anyone else.

It takes specific actions and mindsets to attain/maintain such a world. For example, for years, my wife and I ate dinner together with candles lit and, when the mood struck, with soft music playing in the background. We had our rituals and traditions. The more we engaged with them, the more special and our own they felt.

Making meals together is a straightforward way of doing something together that strengthens the bond, for there is an otherworldly aspect to the making and sharing of food. Of course, when kids arrive, such ‘luxuries’ often fall by the wayside and, for us, they did. But we never lost the memory of those thousands of shared meals and the knowledge that that way of dining would return. Thus, we made do when time was short but with the realization of the temporariness of that state of affairs.

The other aspect of having a secret world is simply to form and keep such a world in one’s imagination. The foundation of this secret world is simply thinking about your relationship in those terms. And, then, comporting yourselves to that idea through the shared and ongoing conjuring up and holding it in place. 

This requires mindfulness. Mindfulness means experiencing life in the light of whatever one is mindful of. In this case, it is mindfulness of your togetherness within your shared enchanted garden, your private world. Experiencing this mysterious, dark, and romantic aspect of being together – with no one else, at no other time nor place, under no circumstances other than the ones that obtain here and now, as an unrepeatable, beautiful occasion in which love, this universal force, this trait of being itself, alights in the material world – there is nothing better than this.

I leave you with this excerpt of a poem by German romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin below and quotes by philosopher Iris Murdoch in the Quotes section.

Once there were gods

Let us live, oh you with me in sorrow, with me in faith
And heart and loyalty, striving for better times!
For such we are! And if ever in the coming years they knew
Of the two of us when spirit again prevails
They would say: lovers in those days, alone, created
Their secret world known to gods alone

Until next time,
Dr. Jack

Quotes

“The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries.” ― Iris Murdoch

“The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life’s most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.” ― Iris Murdoch

“We can only learn love by loving.” – Iris Murdoch

“Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends – and which redeems all the rest.” – Iris Murdoch