The natural affinity for joining with others is your chief function and only purpose and little else is involved in your Being, (although you have added all manner of conditions to your “existing,” based on what the world teaches).
However, your most intense conditional engagements are 'ego-spaztic' and this is especially how “romantic love” can be characterized.
Psychologists refer to these ego-spaztic periods as the “infatuation stage” of romantic relationships. It's a time when orientation to reality becomes somewhat distorted and psychology tends to define it as essentially equivalent to a psychotic state.
I refer to it as ‘ego-spaztic,’ not just because I like to invent stupid terms, but also because the natural affinity toward intimate engagement with others is not egoic nor psychotic, but more a Deep Spirit emergent drive that cannot be resisted and eventually demands attendance. However, this drive to unity can be subsumed and co-opted exclusively for egoic purposes, simply because the ego-self does not know what it is for (because it really doesn't know what anything is for).
The ego-self has no correspondence with anything deeper or beyond itself, although it always senses there is something outside its range of control and this frightens the poop out of it. Therefore, when this drive to deeply engage arises, the ego has no idea of the origin and, therefore, superimposes all manner of rationalized, reality-centered interpretations upon it. Such interpretations eventually impose conditions upon any Deep Spirit drive, eventually making it purely egoic. Although the drive to engage deeply is always present, what is indefinable becomes distorted through the egoic need to define and thus, box it in and contain it.
Note also that the Deep Spirit drive to unity is unconsciously suppressed by the ego (in other words you have no awareness of this suppression) until certain conditions are identified. Those conditions are in relation to other people whom the ego believes meet its preferences (conditions).
The drive for a unified oneness is irresistible, however, the ego recognizes that this drive is not of itself and so has marshaled its forces against this drive resulting in stress, tension and utter exhaustion.
When preferred others have come into your life, the ego then loosens it conceptual boundaries, because it cannot completely resist the deep drive to join and will allow it to arise, but will quickly subsume the drive by imposing its own controlling conditions. These conditions determine who the ego chooses to experience intimate engagement with, and how that engagement should occur. Of course, all in the name of egoic self-maximization.
Nevertheless, we cannot deny that during these periods there is a strong irresistible desire to engage and even feelings of abandoning the self for the 'other' may cause the ego-self significant disorientation. But this is short lived as the ego-self quickly regains its control (by resuming adherence to its core belief system) and ‘reality’ sets in.
The egos resumption of its conditions, and returning to its orientation on the past, can be a difficult time in most relationships and psychology often refers to this as the “accommodation stage.” The ego-self has now almost completely extracted itself from the Deep Spirit drive to join and although this drive still exists, the ego has completely diluted it through its own conditions of love. Eventually, those conditions become unsustainable and the relationship intimacy may erode until even maintaining bodily closeness, let alone deeply engaging, is no longer tolerated by one or both egos.
Unless, of course, both can come from a deeper, non-egoic, place. Unfortunately, this is rare.
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