Falling in Love: Part Twelve: Marc Gafni

Before Boundaries

Maternal love is the movement from onement to separation. Romantic love is the move from separation to onement. -Erich Fromm ‘The Sane Society’

What is the inside of the falling in love experience?

In the first months of life, the baby — as described by many writers, modern and ancient — lives in something that appears to be an enlightened state, hence our near worship of babies. Our baby doubles as our own private guru. Her eyes are a sea of tranquility, her every move a lesson in beauty. In our last chapter we will refer to this state as No-Boundary Awareness. In the baby though, this state is not yet enlightenment, because it is not yet awareness. It just is.

The baby experiences no sense of separateness; but she also experiences no sense of identity. Gradually, the baby begins to develop an identity and to experience itself as separate from its mother. She begins to understand the idea of boundaries. She takes up exactly so much space in the world and not more. Limitation becomes the key to her education. You can’t go there, touch that or cry at this or that time.

Limits are painful and little by little harden into walls. Yet limits are essential to the development of at least the first stage of ethics. “No, you cannot take that money even if you need it. It does not belong to you.” “No, you cannot bite your younger brother’s nose off even though he hit you and it hurts.” Just like you cannot be a Mafia boss later in life who “rubs out” his rival because his honor was offended, or a bank clerk who embezzles customer funds even if it is to pay for college.

While the parent is pleased that the baby eventually becomes “trained,” this socialization and ethical training demands more than a figurative pound of erotic flesh. The baby begins to feel the loneliness of separation. The mother represents the child’s only link to the vague memories of a world before the pain of separation; and so, separation anxiety.

As the baby moves into personhood, the boundaries get thicker, the walls higher, and the lingering sense of separation becomes concrete reality. All of this fosters the throbbing raw pain which we call loneliness. We feel essentially disconnected — our very essence is misunderstood.

marc gafni
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