What I Know About Love
Today is my birthday, and I’ve been reflecting on what I know for sure about love. In the 71 years I’ve been roaming the planet, I’ve often been a slow learner, and some of what I’ll share took me decades to realize, but I’m grateful to have learned it.
What I know about love may not be aligned with conventional wisdom, but what I’m sharing isn’t what I believe or would like to believe. This is what I know for certain about love.
Love is a gift
It can’t be earned or won. It’s not a payoff, reward, bribe, or means of control. It’s a gift. Period. If love isn’t a gift, it isn’t love. It’s some diluted version of love posing as the real thing.
Unconditional love is an oxymoron. We’ve given separate names to qualities that are contained within love: respect, kindness, trust, forgiveness, and compassion. But can you really love someone and not respect them? Can you really love someone and not feel compassion for them? There’s only one kind of love, and it has no conditions attached to it. The difference between love without conditions, and “love” with conditions attached is, as Mark Twain put it, “the difference between lightning, and a lightning bug.”
To love someone completely
To love someone completely, I don’t have to be related to them through birth, family, marriage, genes, gender identity, shared values, or common interests. I was lucky enough to learn this forty years ago from a friend. We were working together in a summer theatre. It was our day off, we were hanging out together, and he was holding his year-old son in his arms. He looked at me and said, “I’m not sure he’s mine, but I love him as much as if he were.” In that moment, I saw and felt for myself what he meant, and it made perfect sense to me. I don’t have children of my own, but that lesson made it possible for me to have completely fulfilling relationships with godchildren, children of friends, and a fair number of young people who’ve needed a little extra help and attention, and to love them without reservation, “as though they were my own.”
“It’s difficult to have an open heart with a closed mind or to have an open mind with a closed heart. “
When one is open, the other wants to be. It’s our nature to have an open mind and an open heart. Closing either one is going against our nature, which makes life seem harder than it needs to be.”
We can’t help who we fall in love with. We just love them. There is no logic in, no reason for, and no fairness to who we love, or who loves us, and there doesn’t need to be. If someone you love doesn’t return that love, though it feels like the most personal thing in the world, it’s not even remotely personal. It only means they aren’t able to see the love you’re made of.
The Wizard was wrong. Dead ass wrong, as my father used to say. In the beloved 1939 MGM picture, The Wizard of Oz, there’s a scene where the wizard gives Dorothy and her friends representations of whatever it is they hoped to get from him and, mistakenly, thought they were missing. As he hands the Tin Man a watch shaped like a heart, the wizard says, “Because remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but how much you are loved by others.” The first time I heard that, as a young child, an alarm went off in my head. I knew instinctively that the reverse was true. What’s most important isn’t how much you’re loved, but how freely you share the love you’re made of, because:
You and I are both made of love, and it’s the same love. The animating force behind every vibration in the universe? It’s love. I find that useful and reassuring, especially when I’m bewildered or confused by what I see going on around me. If, at an essential level, you and I are both made of love, how much different can we be from one another? Any apparent difference or separation between us is meaningless in the face of that essential fact.
Once I’ve judged someone, I can’t really see them anymore, I can only see the judgment I have about them. And because I can’t really see them, I can’t really hear them either. That throws a wet towel on my ability to feel the love I have for them, and it makes me lose sight of the simple fact that:
It’s impossible for a human being to be unworthy of love. Yes, even him, or her; the most “unlovable” person I can think of. If both the person I’ve deemed unlovable and I have lost sight of their being made of love, there’s no way forward for us. It’s up to me to see it and to respond to it because, at that moment, they’re not capable of doing so.
Withholding love is a source of stress. That tension you feel when you deliberately withhold love from someone? That’s you getting in the way of life. And since you are life, you could say it’s you getting in your own way. Doesn’t sound like a recipe for happiness, does it?
Love is never wasted, and you can’t run out of love or use it all up. You’re made of it, remember? Have you ever run out of it before, even if at times you felt emptied out?
My legacy will be the love I leave behind. Stacked up against that, nothing else I leave behind will matter. All the accomplishments, feats, and deeds I’m proud of don’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the love I share and spread during my lifetime. That’s my job as a human. It’s why we’re all here. Remembering that simplifies life immeasurably.
I am presently planning to give the course below in the fall. Please make sure you have signed up for my mailing list to get notified.
