“You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.”
A lot of what we do and how we act is a product of what was done before us. As such, often we take things for granted and do not question their origin. But I want to encourage you to change that.
This is a challenge to consider what love means to you. Even if it makes you feel uncomfortable. I want you think hard about how love exists in the world, and how often it is misconstrued as something volatile and limiting rather than beautiful and liberating.
Love is the strongest thing I believe in. For me, love was never about what I receive in return, or what someone does to earn it. It was simply about appreciating each individual as a living being and understanding that anyone who undergoes common suffering and chooses to persevere in their own unique way is deserving of love
When I started entering romantic relationships I was absolutely swept up by the thrill of returned affections. My first relationship felt like swimming in this sea of love and support, and I told myself it made me feel human, and worthy, as if it gave me purpose.
Like most things, especially first loves, the naïve bliss melted away. I reached a point in this sea of love where instead I was drowning in expectations, and every effort we made to communicate left us choking on the water in our lungs.
Things went this way for some years as I tested the waters with a few more willing people. I had what I would consider my one big love in that time, and when that amounted to only more disappointment I thought it would be best to take myself off the market for a while.
In this time I began learning about Buddhism. It’s not that this experience necessarily changed me, but it allowed me to identify a lot of things I’ve experienced internally throughout my life and relationships, and it’s enabled me to better articulate these things when I’m stuck in my typical ruminations. This is when these questions of love struck me.
The Buddha teaches that there is nothing in this world which has an essence inherent to its existence.
If nothing has an inherent essence and everything is impermanent, it seems factual to me that no single person could have been put on this earth simply in response to my own existential loneliness.
It is selfish of me to assume that another human being, living their own life with their own subjective perspective, could possibly exist purely for the purpose of allowing me someone to love. But if this is right, and soul-mates are just things we’ve constructed to feel less alone, then how will I ever really know when I’m in love? Or if I ever can be in love?
Yet this is the assumption so many people live under for their entire lives, and in fact is one I was raised to believe. From what I can tell though, all it has taught us is to find someone to love and to hold onto them tight. In fact, it has taught us to hold onto them so tight that we risk suffocating them, because if we don’t do that then they will leave us and we may never again feel happiness or completion.
And I’m just not comfortable with this violation of what I think love is really meant to be.
I’ve never for a moment stopped believing in love. But my inability to feel certain about how love is supposed to feel because of the social implications it carries with it now just eats at me. I don’t like that I don’t know how to feel about romantic love.
Then I fell in love (again?).
We fell fast. I remember the first time those three words spilled out between us and I was all too excited to hear them. I truly do mean it when I say that I am in love. It feels extremely beautiful, and it can be invigorating.
Still, I’m not about to make promises of eternal ‘togetherness’ that I cannot guarantee I will keep.
Love seems so beautiful and so without limitations. Yet because of how we have developed, we’ve learned to abuse it and treat it as a way to bind someone to us “forever”.
How different could relationships be if love was only a feeling without these preconceived pressures attached to it?
Love should not have expectations. We mistake our ugly tendencies toward needy obsession and selfishness for this beautiful thing called love. We expect love to make us whole without realizing that in seeking meaning externally we are immediately setting our loved ones up for failure and ignoring our own responsibilities to ourselves.
Love should not be selfish. When we fall in love, we let our pride get ahead of us. We love with such preoccupation that often we lose sight of what the other is experiencing in the relationship. Then we impose boundaries on the ones we want to keep the closest to ensure we won’t ever have to let them go.
Love should not be fear. We meet someone remarkable and we want to be with them, so we manipulate those feelings of desire into misguided conclusions that they are vital to our existence. When we do this, we turn healthy love and fascination into something we are terrified to be without.
Love should not be dependency. We convince ourselves we are not worthwhile unless someone loves us, we are not truly living unless we are in love, we are not truly complete unless we have found that person who was sculpted for us by some greater power to be our second half.
Love is not an illusion, but I do think it is something which we have allowed to become socially constructed and dictated to us. Love is a delicate art, and we tend to batter and bruise it until we can barely recognize it anymore. When anything is familiarized or taken for granted, it becomes foggy and we lose sight of what it really means to love.
I am not saying I have the answers, I still struggle… clearly. But with this new love in the picture, I am trying harder than ever to redefine a love that feels right to me. One that is free of chains and expectations.
I think that if everyone considered these things for just a moment, people may be able to learn how to love without fear, without imposition, without dooming it to failure.
