Balance in Love: Individuality vs Unity

In many of the words written in the definition of loving relationships, “respect for each other’s individuality” is a stand-out element. This leads to the question of balance in a relationship : what is more important? To adhere to the self or to blend into the union? Ideal love allows this question and finds the compromise, the complement, the flexibility, the understanding …
Anyway, enough about what love should be!

The love that demands that being apart is intolerable comes from intimacy, not to clinging to an ideal of individuality. This intimacy gives rise to idioms like “ you complete me”, “ you are my other half”, “ I am only half-living without you”.

This is a very dangerous intimacy which makes us vulnerable. To lose that intimacy is the devastation that break-ups deal with. However it is the element of love that you would die for, to feel as one with your partner in a unique and totally exclusive way.

Sometimes this is an intimacy which you best realize years after being together.

Poems about this feeling can be included in your ceremony, even read by you to each other.

Here are two, one by a famous Spanish poet, Pablo Neruda, and the other by the Chinese poet, Kuan Tao Chung:

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that you hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.”

Married Love

“You and I
Have so much love
That it burns like a fire
In which we bake a lump of clay
Moulded into figure of you
And a figure of me.
Then we take both of them
And break them into pieces
And mix the pieces with water
And mould again a figure of you
And a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.”