By Reza Ganjavi
It started off nicely. He was buying her all the presents, kissing up to her 24x7, they got married. They felt like they were better than anything else in the world, as the friend reports, and they did everything together. Two years later problems started... the guy's possessiveness and selfishness hidden behind all the gifts showed up... and all the gifts and kissing up turned into hatred and anger and her feeling of being in a prison by him and his expectations. By that time they also had a baby in order to distract them from the problems -- which only made it more complicated. She's wondering what to do!
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Reza’s comment:
Of course every relationship is different so I can't talk generally. I think there are certain things that only men understand and certain things that only women understand, about the working of the brain of a male or a female from an animalistic conditioning standpoint. Evolutionary psychology sheds a lot of light on this subject. Pursuit, possessiveness, desire to conquer, etc. can be wrapped around love -- and I don't doubt there's love there -- but if there is no understanding of deeper layers and motives love becomes a matter of security.
Pursuit is a movement of becoming. Yes some of it can be natural, but when it's sustained by thought one is caught in that whole realm of competition, becoming, etc. and those gifts become what I call means for "implicit impregnation" where in this case for example, the woman becomes pregnant by the gifts -- like bribes. The sad thing is some people like that. Especially if they hadn't had enough attention in early life.
Love without a trace of pursuit, holding, becoming, has a totally different quality.