How to love maturely without falling back into the mystical trap of illusion
Sometimes the night greets me with a strange sensation — not so much pain as a question, one that slips into the periphery of my thoughts like a light unsure of whether it wishes to remain. After every disappointment there arrives this moment: the moment when you no longer ask “Why did it happen?” but begin to listen to a quieter, almost prayerful inner register: “How can it not happen again?” Not as self-blame. Not as fear of falling once more. But as the desire to learn to love without breaking apart, without turning love into a field where your own shadows outweigh the light.
I write these lines as if in a diary, though I’m not entirely sure whether I’m speaking to myself, to time, or to that invisible presence I sometimes call soul, sometimes God, and sometimes simply my own inner ground. Here I want to gather not rules, but orientations; not boundaries, but supports; not prohibitions, but quiet, almost invisible paths toward maturity. Paths that do not reject the mystical, yet do not allow it to tear me away from reality.
Because we — people with thin inner boundaries, with vast inner worlds echoing like cathedrals, with an intensity that sometimes feels like prayer and sometimes like storm — often experience love as depth, as resonance, as an inner expansion that can be divine but also dangerous. Sometimes we give love too much internal authority. So I remind myself — or time reminds me through dreams, coincidences, unexpected silences — to protect myself not from love, but from my own inclination to turn love into mythology.
And so, in this evening entry, I try to express — through spiritual wisdom and through my psychoanalytic eye — how to love maturely, without slipping again into the mystical trap of illusion.
1. To distinguish a relationship from a projection.
I know that the finest boundary is the one between two people when one of them is not the other person, but their own fantasy. Projection — I hear Freud whisper inside me — is what we create when lack speaks louder than reality. This inner cinema that we project onto the other is beautiful, but it is a one-person spectacle. Only we are there.
A relationship is a meeting — a real, slightly awkward, sometimes painfully simple — meeting of two realities.
Projection grows in silence: the less you know about someone, the more story you invent.
A relationship grows in communication: the more you speak, the more real everything becomes.
Projection makes you believe destiny is speaking.
A relationship allows you to hear the voice of the human being.
Projection is lonely beauty; the relationship is imperfect truth.
And maturity, I think, is the capacity to choose that imperfect truth over the glow of solitary dreaming.
2. Not to interpret everything.
I am one of those people who read the world like a text. Sometimes I see symbols in the accidental shape of clouds, signs in the way someone says “hello,” cosmic logic in someone’s absence. Sensitivity is a gift — the ability to hear the subterranean echo of things.
But the gift becomes a burden when we begin to live not the life itself, but its supposed messages. When our inner voices — sometimes wounds, sometimes fears, sometimes unfilled spaces — acquire the authority of prophecies.
The truth is simple: most things do not carry the role we assign to them. The psyche has the habit of filling empty spaces with mythology. But wisdom lies in allowing some things to mean nothing at all.
3. To respect the reality of the other person.
This is the hardest thing for those with rich inner universes: to accept that the other will not resonate at the same frequency. That they have the right not to feel like you; not to see the world as you do; not to choose you — and that this is not cruelty, but simple reality.
Psychoanalysis says that this is the moment when the ego surrenders its fantasy of omnipotence. Spirituality says that this is the moment when we allow the other to be a soul, not a reflection.
The purest form of letting go is not the one where we detach, but the one where we remain open without expecting. Without turning someone’s freedom into proof of our inadequacy.
4. To have “inner ground.”
There is a place in me — sparse, quiet, almost bare — where there are no symbols, no signs, no interpretations. This is my inner ground. Sometimes I find it only when I am exhausted by my own interpretations. Sometimes it appears in prayer, sometimes in the morning light before the day has taken shape.
This place is the refuge from which I can look at my emotions as waves, not destiny.
Only with inner ground can we love without flying out of ourselves. Without losing ourselves in the ecstasy of early resonance. Without allowing love to become a spiritual escape.
5. Not to believe every inner voice.
Not every inner voice is intuition.
Sometimes it is fear speaking in the tone of prophecy.
Sometimes it is an old wound insisting on being confirmed.
Sometimes it is loneliness dressed in the language of destiny.
True intuition does not shout. It does not push. It does not dramatize. It never says “must.”
It is quiet, bright, almost transparent — a gentle inner “I know” that requires no proof.
And perhaps maturity is precisely this: learning to distinguish the quiet signs of the soul from the loud calls of the ego.
6. To protect our boundaries — not as walls, but as frames.
Boundaries — though they may sound like a psychological term — are a spiritual practice. They do not say, “I don’t love,” but rather, “I want to remain whole while loving.” Boundaries are the architecture of love, the structure in which feelings do not spill destructively.
For us who know intensity too well, the most important thing is to leave space for development, not only for ecstasy. To not give everything in the first moment. To allow love to unfold naturally, like a flower whose petals we do not force open prematurely.
7. Not to fall in love with the future.
This is my personal trap: to fall in love not with the person, but with their potential. Not with what is, but with what could be. But love for someone’s future version is the most subtle form of self-deception.
To love maturely means being able to say:
“I love what is — not what might be.”
It is humility. And freedom.
8. To believe that real love will come.
This is the quietest, yet brightest part. After illusions comes bitterness; after pain — tightening; after disappointment — distrust in the world. But maturity is the ability to believe again — not in the same way, but more wisely.
To love not with an expectation of destiny, but with a desire for presence.
Not with projection, but with vision.
Not with obsession, but with gentleness.
Not in search of signs, but in search of truth.
To love maturely means to keep the heart open but hold it with awareness, not blind hope. It means to feel without losing yourself, to see without imagining, to dream without building temples from coincidences.
This is a love that does not shimmer like a vision, does not spill like illusion, does not tremble like mystical ecstasy.
It is quieter, deeper, more grounded.
It does not promise salvation — it promises presence.
And perhaps this is the greatest miracle:
that maturity in love does not kill the mystical, but transforms it from a trap into a blessing.
From a dream — into a home.
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