While I was at The Pause I read Call Off The Search by Anna (Pasternak) and Andrew Wallas. Why? Because Danielle suggested I might find
it interesting. She runs courses with
Andrew Wallas and says he’s a good guy. So
I did. It wasn’t as if I had anything
else I was burning to read: I haven’t read anything lately that has rocked my
boat, that has really made me think or feel.
It seemed a bit
familiar and then I remembered that I’d read an extract from it in a supplement
when it first came out. It had annoyed
the hell out of me. So I guess that’s
one very good reason to read it, huh?
What annoyed me? Well, the book is all about how you shouldn’t ever
give up on a relationship; that you have to work through the fights and the
anguish and the tough times. That love
relationships can easily call up your ‘core wounding’ – that early first
pattern of hurt and disappointment we suck in with our mother’s milk – and offer
a wonderful opportunity to heal at a deep, primal level. Which is all very stoic and good except that…Andrew Wallas left his relationship. He told Anna Pasternak she was a posh spoilt insecure
bitch, got her sobbing in his yurt and then had this sudden ‘ka-boom!’ realisation
that she was his One True Love. So, what
did he do? He left his wife. Just like that. All very amicable apparently but still…
Marriage neatly dissolved, the whole book is all about how he and new ‘True
Love’ Anna work out their stuff. It's about how they fight and bicker and
nearly break up all the time, how they love each other but also sometimes
hate each other; and how that can all change in a heartbeat. Bottom line, they just slog it out with
brutal honesty. Which is great. I mean, good for them…but, but, but… all the
way through I was left wondering ‘And what about his ex-wife?’
The relationship, he says, was ‘emotionally
empty’. So then, it’s okay to walk out
of a relationship if it’s ‘emotionally empty’?
I dunno, it just seemed all a bit too convenient somehow. How do you know if your relationship is ‘emotionally
empty’? Maybe emotionally empty is a
manifestation of core wounding? Bottom
line, how do you know if it’s doomed, terminal, that it’s time to pack up your
yurt and move on, or whether you should stay, drive in your yurt pegs a bit
deeper and sledgehammer away at it? A&A
just don’t answer that question. So I
was left pondering it myself.
Maybe it’s about a ‘charge’? If a
relationship still has ‘juice’? As the saying goes it’s a
thin line between love and hate but both are positive emotions, right? As in emotions that have a positive charge,
that are powerful, punchy, full-on. I’ve
always felt that the true opposite of love isn’t hate but apathy. If a relationship has become apathetic, if
the parties involved are just going through the motions,
presumably that is what A&A are calling time on? Can you give apathy an adrenalin shot? Can you juice it up? Or should you just sigh and move on? What if your core wounding has left you
unable to love?
I don’t know. I really don’t. All
I know is that, all through the book, I kept wondering when we were going to
hear about his first marriage. I wanted
to know what happened to his ex-wife.
Did she find ‘True Love’ as well, or is she sitting somewhere reading
the book and shoving her fingers down her throat over each gushing paragraph? How did she feel when he told her it was all
over? Was she gutted or secretly
relieved? Did she punch the air and go, ‘Yessss! I always hated that fucking yurt!’
I guess I wanted to hear about how one lives when
the projections of falling in love fall away.
That, to me, is the more interesting question. A&A are clearly still madly passionately
in love. Will they still feel the same
way in twenty years? Is that True Love? What
is?
I wasn’t intending to write this blog post. There was a bit in the book, a concept that
intrigued me and I was going to blog about that but this came out instead. But, hey, it is what it is. What do you think?
