The mercurial nature of love | Dushka Zapata

Have you ever held mercury in the palm of your hand?

(I have, before I knew it was dangerous to do so - so please consider this answer the metaphor that it is without trying this at home.)

Mercury is a liquid metal and if you hold your hand open it pools in the center of it, shiny, metallic, cool, peaceful, still, alive.

If you squeeze your hand shut it squirts out through your fingers.

Mercury can only be held loosely, in a palm wide open, and I think the same is true for love.

Needy love is desperate, voracious, possessive, jealous, grasping. Your heart, filled with fear and an illusion of dependency, loops tightly around it, ultimately squeezing out anything beautiful.

Needy love means you will (sooner or later) lose everything.

It’s best to love without needing. This is healthy love, open love, airy love, the kind that sets you free.

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Feeling afraid to lose someone is very painful. It means I approach the relationship from a place of anxiety and insecurity.

Because it usually results in grasping, it tends to devolve into possessiveness, attempt to control and jealousy.

This fear of losing someone I love tends to not be related to my relationship but rather towards the way I regard myself.

If this continues unaddressed it will present itself in every relationship I have.

This is because the source of the problem is not that I believe you will leave me but that I believe I am not worthy of you staying.

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Dushka Zapata http://www.quora.com/profile/duska-zapata

Dushka Zapata is my all-time favorite online writer on inter- and intra-personal relationships who I've been following since 2016.