…but what is this thing called love?! You’d think we should all know by now since we’re surrounded by it in books and movies, songs and social media. Yet despite all our conversations – Who’s together now? Who wants to get together? – we always seem to get confused by love. Surely such a beautiful thing shouldn’t hurt so much. And why doesn’t it last? When a relationship ends, why do we retreat into blame and bad feelings?
Our thoughts and feelings on the subject get all tangled up when what we think of someone’s behaviour changes how we feel about them. So maybe we’re just not thinking about love the right way…
Despite how relatively comfortable our lives are now compared with previous generations – and yes, there are still many who struggle with poverty, poor housing and lack of opportunity – a simple truth is that we all need to feel secure and cared for.
This is what drives most of us into relationships with others. It may begin with a physical attraction, we like their smile, their eyes, how they move. Then the dopamine and norepinephrine get to work on our energy! Or maybe we’re drawn to someone by their intelligence, their interests or how they speak. Gradually we become closer and find that they make us feel safe, they understand our fears and they can meet our innermost needs.
This is human nature. But there is a deep fault line in this structure we’re building. It’s “they”. We are allowing our feelings, even perhaps the very course of our lives, to depend on someone else. In this way, many of our partnerships become conditional on how the other person acts towards us and how they live their lives. In turn, we find that they are imposing conditions on us, expecting us to speak or behave or even dress in certain ways.
And all too soon we have given up the most precious gifts that every human being has been given: our identity and our freedom of thought.
Yet it is also a truth that people change! We learn new things and find different interests, our bodies change and become less attractive or develop illness, we get stressed by work or money and take others for granted. And ‘the other’ no longer gives us what we thought we needed. The fault line cracks open and there’s an earthquake in our lives. We no longer feel safe.
It’s estimated that around 45% of American marriages end in divorce, it’s a little lower in the UK and far higher in Russia, for example. But hey, there’s no natural law saying that human partnerships should be unbreakable (however desirable that may seem). And after all, what we hope for in our lives is rather different these days to the expectations of earlier generations. Maybe it is natural that many of us will drift apart and make new partnerships. Still, surely that doesn’t mean there was no love in our previous relationship, that we should have regrets or blame others.
Let’s think in a different way.
Perhaps, then, love is something that comes and goes,
something within ourselves that we sense at times and then lose sight of,
something that others help us feel but does not depend on them?
Perhaps our security and sense of being cared for lie in our own hands!
This is not an easy thing to grasp since we have been conditioned throughout history to believe in the ideal relationship and a perfect communion between two people. We write great stories about them, where the destined lovers overcome all kinds of challenges and get together on the last page, riding arm in arm into the sunset. There’s Romeo and Juliet – oh no, that ended badly. What about Paris of Troy and the lovely Helen? Um, that caused a war.
Are there any better candidates? ‘Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips,’ wrote Percy Shelley, the Romantic poet, of his relationship with Mary. And Abigail Smith wrote that her marriage to John Adams was ‘…more binding than humanity, and stronger than friendship…’ What made these couples special was that their partnerships were not based on physical appearance or their personal needs, but on a deep sense of spirituality.
We also find this kind of love expressed not for a life partner but for the whole of humanity, by such inspirational individuals as Jesus of Nazareth, Martin Luther King Jnr and the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Julian of Norwich described her sense of oneness with all-that-is as ‘revelations of Divine love’, whilst the Sufi scholar and mystic Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī wrote, ‘Love is the bridge between you and everything.’
Some of us, if we are fortunate, may get a fleeting sense of this when we gaze at a cloudless night sky or walk through a peaceful woodland. It may even be a lucid dream of a beautiful landscape, where we realise that our minds have touched a higher level of consciousness than we ever know in everyday earthly life. Such experiences give us a sense of our own spiritual identity.
This ability is within each one of us and does not depend on any other person, nor does it belong to any one relationship. Naturally, we tend to think of love as something shared with the special people in our lives. But surely the reality is that these connections awaken our deep awareness of what is already within us.
In fact, we learn the secret of what love really is when a personal relationship breaks down! We might have shared something special that later we lost touch with, yet we should not deny that we knew love; and, of course, we can find it again with another. So love does not depend on the people in our lives – it is part of our own inner nature, a state of mind, that we can all reach at any time.
Perhaps surprisingly for some, the great physicist Albert Einstein expressed something very much like this in a letter to his daughter Lieserl, published some three decades after his death.
‘There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others… love… This force gives meaning to life.’ He goes on to describe love as a ‘universal energy’ that transcends everything and is ‘the quintessence of life.’
Einstein warns that humanity has lost control of the other (physical) forces of the universe and that love is the only way to find meaning in life and, indeed, save the world.
Once we understand the true nature of love, then, is there a way that we can bring this awareness into our everyday lives? Well, most of us are not political reformers or mystics! But once we know that love is no less than our spiritual identity, and that our happiness does not depend on others, we will surely begin to lose our attachment to possessions, status and, indeed, to other people. If love is the essential force that ‘gives meaning to life’ and is shared by all, then every event and meeting becomes meaningful. We become kinder and more respectful. We are grateful for all that we have and for all the people in our lives, even though some situations and relationships may be challenging.
No, this is not easy and such radical changes of outlook do not happen overnight. Yet regular spiritual practice will certainly change the way we think and feel in time. We can give ourselves a talking to each morning and evening, reminding ourselves of life’s blessings and resolving to put our mistakes right and learn from them. We can spend a little time each day in quiet meditation, sensing the spirit within and all around us in nature. We can take responsibility for our own thoughts and feelings, trying to let go of past pain and refusing to blame others for it.
Our new loving energy may even uplift others and help them
to be more peaceful and caring too. Perhaps we can yet save the world!
Nigel Peace
Nigel Peace is the author of several spiritual books, both fiction and nonfiction. His new novel is The Unbroken, a story of deep human love and an adventure through the mysterious worlds of the mind. It is published worldwide by Roundfire Books on September 24th, 2024.
