Yesterday many people in the world celebrated Valentine’s Day and expressed in many different ways their love and affection for a loved one. I did not celebrate it for two simple reasons; I don’t believe in mass commercialised events (ie being told by shops and manufacturers that you have to do this because they say so and because they want to make a load of money from selling their tat) and also much more importantly I don’t understand love.
Yes I am married and I have children but I don’t understand love. I always imagine that it is meant to be some deep and meaningful thing that somehow binds you invisibly to another person but then that just sounds like magic which is nonsense. If I were to psychoanalyse myself I would say that from an early age people I used to care a lot about died and I would get very upset and somehow I have tried to cut off that feeling in my mind and body to help me avoid being hurt again. Others might question the way I was loved as a child. I have no doubt that my parents loved me (some might say that my mother loved me too much as I was tied fast to those apron strings) but I do know that there was next to no physical expression of love between my parents or from my parents. We were certainly never a huggy, kissy type of family.
A third reason may just simply be that my Aspie mind doesn’t quite get it. I understand from something I read recently that there is a thing called a relationship continuum and to progress along it you need to have understandings of feelings and emotions that often do not come easily to an autistic or aspie individual. In fact the same article highlighted for me that in my mind I am probably only really at the adolescent male stage of understanding emotions and sometimes even that level is a bit rocky. That is not a good place for a middle-aged, married parent to be in but it is a good thing to have finally realised and understood a little.
Another aspect affecting my understanding of love is my extremely low sense of self esteem. In other words I simply do not love myself or even know how to love myself in fact many times I actually hate myself. Yes that is a strong word but it is exactly how I feel. I hate everything about myself and can see nothing good in myself so how on earth can anyone else love me? Yes my wife tells me she loves me but I just see it as being something that people like us are meant to say to each other and I accept it but I don’t really believe her when she says it after all what is there to love?
So where does someone like me go to from here? Well the new understandings I mentioned earlier are a good place to start but they are also quite painful too. It is very difficult to suddenly realise that an almost 50 year old barely has the same emotional understanding as a 14 or 15 year old. It is also very difficult to admit how I feel about myself but you can’t do anything about anything unless you start by admitting where you are at present just like an alcoholic can’t change their ways unless they first understand and admit they have a problem in the first place.
I know that counselling therapy would help me a lot but equally I am aware that that is not a realistically available option. Some would say that cognitive behavioural therapy would be useful but I haven’t found it to be of any use in the past as it seems to me to be too generalistic and never specific enough to me and my circumstances for me to understand it or get anything from it. Further research through the internet can help me to understand myself further but it is very difficult to find sites specific to what I am looking for and also when I do find things like I mentioned earlier it can be quite devastating and dangerous as it makes me realise quite suddenly how far behind I am and just how different I am from most other people making my ability to appear more “normal” seemingly even more impossible to attain.
So I am glad and a little jealous of any of you who did manage to properly enjoy Valentine’s Day and wish you all well in your new or existing relationships. I hope that one day I will get there before it is too late but in the first place I simply hope that I can somehow feel a bit better about myself and towards myself.
Grumpy Old Daddy 