Thursday, October 25, 2007
Life After God...
So, for a class I'm taking at VST this semester, I have to re-read Douglas Coupland's "Life After God," which has long been one of my favourite books.
I was talking to an old acquaintance tonight (yup, you Peter C), and we had both basically spent our days discussing relationship issues with friends. As in issues of friends.
Anyway, tonight as I was getting ready for bed, I was reading the book, and this section stuck out to me - it seems all too accurate for many in my world, both men and women. So... for all of my hurting friends... this is for you, from Douglas Coupland:
"Now: I am an affectionate man but I have much trouble showing it.
When I was younger, I used to worry so much about being alone - of being unlovable or incapable of love. As the years went on, my worries changed. I worried that I had become incapable of having a relationship, of offering intimacy. I felt as though the world lived inside a warm house at night and I was outside, and I couldn't be seen - because I was out there in the night. But now I am inside that house and it feels just the same.
Being alone here now, all of my old fears are erupting - the fears I thought I had buried forever by getting married: fear of loneliness; fear that being in and out of love too many times itself makes you harder to love; fear that I would never experience real love; fear that someone would fall in love with me, get extremely close, learn everything about me and then pull the plug; fear that love is only important up until a certain point after which everything is negotiable.
For so many years I lived a life of solitude and I thought life was fine. But I knew that unless I explored intimacy and shared intimacy with someone else then life would never progress beyond a certain point. I remember thinkign that unless I knew what was going on inside of someone else's head other than my own I was going to explode." (Douglas Coupland's "Life After God" p. 142-143)
I was talking to an old acquaintance tonight (yup, you Peter C), and we had both basically spent our days discussing relationship issues with friends. As in issues of friends.
Anyway, tonight as I was getting ready for bed, I was reading the book, and this section stuck out to me - it seems all too accurate for many in my world, both men and women. So... for all of my hurting friends... this is for you, from Douglas Coupland:
"Now: I am an affectionate man but I have much trouble showing it.
When I was younger, I used to worry so much about being alone - of being unlovable or incapable of love. As the years went on, my worries changed. I worried that I had become incapable of having a relationship, of offering intimacy. I felt as though the world lived inside a warm house at night and I was outside, and I couldn't be seen - because I was out there in the night. But now I am inside that house and it feels just the same.
Being alone here now, all of my old fears are erupting - the fears I thought I had buried forever by getting married: fear of loneliness; fear that being in and out of love too many times itself makes you harder to love; fear that I would never experience real love; fear that someone would fall in love with me, get extremely close, learn everything about me and then pull the plug; fear that love is only important up until a certain point after which everything is negotiable.
For so many years I lived a life of solitude and I thought life was fine. But I knew that unless I explored intimacy and shared intimacy with someone else then life would never progress beyond a certain point. I remember thinkign that unless I knew what was going on inside of someone else's head other than my own I was going to explode." (Douglas Coupland's "Life After God" p. 142-143)
