When we were children we’ve read the fairytale- “The Beauty and the Beast”. You remember the lesson there, don’t you? The Beast’s only chance to become a Prince is to find a Beauty who will love him whilst he is still a Beast.
Even though the fairy tale makes it clear, that being loved for what you are when you are unlovable changes you for the better, it omits to say that Beauty’s personal qualities are altered, too – in the process of learning how to love the Beast.
There is no person that love cannot heal; there is no soul that love cannot save.
-Carlos Santana
You might choose to leave “toxic relationship” or you might take a different approach- believe that lovers are helping each other to become their best self, which is an important aspect of a love relationship, encouraged in every culture and by every religion.
On the other hand, love could be associated with bringing out the worst in you, and an example could be the “bestiality”:
She would go down on all fours in her chemise on her fur rags, prowling around and growling, as though she wanted to eat
him… and he loved this humiliation, relished the pleasure of being an animal… they were maddened by sex, thrown into the delirious imaginations of the flesh… the terrors of their
sleepless nights were turning now into a thirst for bestiality…
– Émile Zola, Nana
Experimenting with that sort of behavior, however, doesn’t seem to bring us feeling of happiness or contentment, or increase
affection for our “partner in crime”; just the opposite in fact. We seem to start feeling hatred, and even commit an extreme violence, to our lover – the person who had witnessed
us degrading our own spirit in that way. (See movies In the Realm of Senses, Bitter Moon, etc.)
Oh, but real passion, it has no limits, right? And the world of intimacies is endlessly enticing, terrifying, mesmerizing, so please, please,
DO NOT tell me what to do or not to do with my lover…!
What seems to make all the difference is how deeply you fall in love spiritually before your daring experiments with the bodily sensations will commence.
Your soul is well aware how to lead you into becoming “one flesh”. But if you begin with the body… the body knows not where to lead you, except into more and more sensations of the flesh, which by themselves have no power to feed love’s deeper hunger.
Linda Goodman, Love Signs