Why would we run away from love? Because on the way to maturity, we realize that for love to be true and to endure, it demands everything from us. It demands death to our selfishness, our self-absorption, our desire to always put ourselves first. And we don't learn what love is unless we practice loving, always hard work, always an experience that leads to pain and confusion, along with, hopefully, some light and joy.
True love relationships require walking bumpy roads, one step forward, two steps back, a lot of talking along with the walking. Along the way, we discover that when two people love each other, whatever the relationship, they are not always dependent, not always independent, but always interdependent. Both people allow the other to be independent and free to develop into a mature, creative, giving human being who still stays in sensitive "two-ness." Both people depend on each other but they do not cling to the other in devouring dependency.
Interdependence means being always there for each other when needed, and being a fully functioning team of two independent, loving, creative human beings. This can cause tensions and arguments; but these interactions can help people define themselves, each other, and the relationship.
The most exhausting and terrifying and ultimately rewarding relationship is marriage, and it works when both people commit to the bumpy road, the constant talking and redefining themselves, the allowing each other to grow, the acceptance of change in each other over the long haul. Mignon McLaughlin, American journalist and author, married to Robert McLaughlin, editor of "Time" magazine, wrote "A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person."
Parents and children ideally work throughout their lives to understand each other and give each other freedom to grow yet stay connected. It is sad when parents think they own their children; it is equally sad when children desert their parents: "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child." (Shakespeare.)
Yet the most poisonous relationship, one that casts a shadow over one's entire life, is to have controlling and abusive parents. Paulo Coelho, the famous Brazilian novelist and lyricist, told his parents that he wanted to be a writer; enraged, they had him placed in a mental institution two times in a row. Yet later, freed, he became known world-wide as the author of the much loved novel, "The Alchemist."
Coelho, able to mentally stand back, accept, understand, and forgive, writes "Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, that children understand; their stories and all their accomplishments sit atop the stories of their mothers and their fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the water of their lives."
Coelho also writes of love in general: "When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too." This is a beautiful description of love's ever-present ripple effect. When we are bearers of the beauty of love, we shine that beauty into the world, and everyone around us catches light from us.
To return to St. Augustine, he speaks of the most difficult, unpredictable love relationship in our lives, our love relationship with God. And he describes God as the most passionate, single-minded Lover in our lives: "God loves each of us as if there were only one of us." This God pursues our relationship with Him with single-minded devotion, yet respects us enough not to impose His will or His love on us. He waits for us to respond. And so our relationship with God goes, down a sometimes bumpy road, one step forward, two steps back, until we achieve a dance of joyous interdependence.
Augustine, who famously fled God a good part of his life, finally said what we all can say:" Thou has created us for Thyself, oh God, and our heart is not quiet, until it rests in Thee."