Jack Mauro
Here's a little something to ponder. It's weighty but I'm confident you will give it the thought it merits, for it has much to do with your feelings for your partner. It's what I call love-as-recognition.
It once hit me, rather out of the blue and while I was writing fiction, that, when we fall for someone hard and fairly suddenly, it's not because we are thunderstruck by this new presence. We are instead somehow recognizing a love we have known before and dazzled that it is back. Now, before you pooh-pooh this as Karmic rubbish, please know that I am not necessarily referring to anything mystical (although that possibility exists). I think rather that this guy who so mesmerizes us is bringing before us a composite of elements all loved, desired and familiar, yet unfamiliar – or at least impossible to identify as such – because we have never seen this exact mix before.
Yet the magic happens, nonetheless, due to what has happened in the past. There is evidence of this belief of an ugly and pragmatic kind in the common cycles gone through by those unable to free themselves of abusive partners, time and again. They do not consciously choose the abuse but they know it, and familiarity is not a pull to be lightly dismissed. So as well, and more happily, do we moth-like turn to traces of what we have known and wanted before. The traces, again, may be too indistinct to note. But something is reminding you of what you feel love to be. It is rarely new, love. When we're lucky, however, it's better than new because it's finally just right.
You may now officially cease pondering.
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