Love Guilt...

I've written before that love is regressive, that the longer we remain in community with another, as long as our relationship continues to grow in a positive direction, love becomes messy. We let down our defenses, we show more and more of our inner selves, we become more vulnerable, a step at a time, as we get that positive reinforcement that we are still loved, and accepted. We become more known, we learn the inner secrets of our partner. As we give more of ourselves, as we reveal more of our warts and imperfections, and as we gain more insight into our partner, we also find a negative fruit of love- guilt.
It's interesting to think of love as spawning guilt, but because we are imperfect in ourselves and our love, we will experience both hurt and failings in our responses to our mates. We can't learn to really love unless we're willing to run the risks of hurting and failing. The rememberance of these hurts, these failings of ours (not necessarily those of our partner's) will produce guilt, regrets, that questioning of how to do things better, or how to do or act differently. And especially if the relationship fails, then guilt really plays on us. Our reaction is to close down, to not allow ourselves to become vulnerable, to not want to replay or relive those hurts or failings, and we cripple ourselves in our attempts at a successful future love relationship.
So what to do? We need to embrace our failings, own our wrongs, our hurts and learn from them. We need to be intentional in our desire not to create the same mistakes, to repeat our failures. And we need to be willing to be to vulnerable. It amazes me that so often we can't seem to own our faults. I think too often we feel our self-esteem can't handle our admissions of guilt so we supress those thoughts, those feelings. And guilt eats us away. And we close ourselves off, shut ourselves down. Owning our failings is the most freeing thing we can do, for it allows us to move forward, and releases us from guilt's grip. It will even build our self-esteem, as we learn that we can own our faults and move forward, that it doesn't tear us down. We often find it easy to extend grace to those who wrong us; we need to learn to extend grace to ourselves...