Strange, isn't it, that we're willing to sacrifice almost anything for love? As lovers, partners, parents, friends, we enter into relationships with a crazy kind of happiness and hope. And even when we're fully warned about the disillusionment that always follows that first blush of frenzied hope, we still find ourselves suffering painfully when it happens, too often feeling like a failure. I don't need to tell you that people can be destroyed and upended by failed relationships with a parent, child, spouse, sibling, friend or lover. Undoubtedly you know from your own experience how the promise of being open, trusting and intimate with another person can become dark, frightening, painful or dead in ways you could never have imagined at the outset. If love were a commercial product or gadget, it would have to be recalled. Nothing that fails so badly and so often would be allowed to stay on the market.
Why, in spite of its painful malfunctions and repeated failures, do we sustain our wild hope for love?
Because, I believe, love is the only way we can really come to know and accept ourselves as we are. The human spirit is born in a couple relationship - we come into life inside someone else - and it thrives in dyadic relationships. A pair bond, not an individual, is our fundamental "unit" of consciousness. Left alone, the fragile human infant folds in on itself and dies. Throughout life, no matter how much we deny or rationalize it, we know intrinsically that we need someone else - first a parent, then a friend, then a partner, and then perhaps our own children - in order to discover who we are. Just as we can't see our own faces (but only a reflection in a mirror), we forever need others in order to come into contact with ourselves.
Even as adults, we all long for someone to hold us in mind on a daily basis and to talk us into ourselves. We want someone to stand on common ground with us and help us see our strengths and weaknesses, hopes and dreams. Love seeds our lives with questions of meaning and opportunities for penetrating the mysteries of being human. Love invites us repeatedly into intoxicating fields of interconnection in which we must come to discern who we are in relation to a specific other.
Though love presents us with rich possibilities, it also brings pain, rejection, confusion and conflict. In loving a child or a partner, we have to trust and depend on the other, as well as be trustworthy and dependable in our own right. Do we take our closest relationships to be a place of freedom where we can most truly be ourselves? Or do we take them to be a kind of prison in which we are bound to the needs of others through guilt or a desire to please? In our adult lives, our closest relationships bring a daily opportunity to heal our emotional wounds and, paradoxically, constitute the greatest obstacles to doing so.
Quite a while ago, the writer Scott Peck reminded us that "love is not a feeling," by which he meant that love requires cultivating and refining and sustaining a particular attitude towards your beloved (whether a partner, a child, a friend, a spiritual teacher, a parent -- once you're grown up -- or yourself). Love is an attitude of gentle and friendly attention, a willingness to be interested in the other, to take care of the other even when your feelings are hurt, sometimes even after you have been harmed. And this attitude, while it involves generosity and optimism, does not include martyrdom or self-abnegation. Rather it is a way to keep your heart (which includes what you might call your "mind") open through the brokenness and broken-heartedness that all love relationships guarantee. Indeed, love requires you to take a training to break your heart while keeping contact with hope, flexibility and new discoveries.
A tragic and unwelcome brokenness in my own life brought me to a new understanding of love. Beginning somewhere in the early 2000's, my husband and best friend for three decades gradually succumbed to early onset Alzheimer's disease. Insidious as it is, Alzheimer's first undermined my trust in Ed. For the first five years after the onset of the disease, I did not know that he was ill. Without any way to explain them, I witnessed daily bizarre behaviors, embarrassing errors, bad judgment and pervasive anxieties in my beloved. I began to wonder what had happened to us as a couple. In 2007, when Ed was 59 years old, he underwent an extensive psychological evaluation. We were stunned by the results - he'd lost over 50 points of his IQ and was in the first percentile on all measures of executive functioning. Our lives changed at that moment: Ed had to quit his work (he'd been a psychotherapist), go on disability, and begin a process of involved neurological diagnosis. The next two years brought a rapid downhill slide as we got a conclusive diagnosis of advanced Alzheimer's dementia and fully felt the effects of Ed's inability to manage our accounts and finances.
Now Ed lives in a lovely and serene community care center, an assisted living facility in the Vermont countryside, where he thrives even though he is fast declining. I live alone (with a big dog) in the home we established in 2000 - the place that was to fulfill our dreams of retreating into nature and spiritual practice. It's a splendid spot on the side of a mountain with no ambient light at night and about six hundred acres of almost unpopulated forest surrounding it. I make the hour-long trek to visit Ed twice weekly, oversee his care, and take him out for walks and dinners. He is no longer really able to carry on a conversation, and he can't come to our home because it's too disorienting for him.
Alone now, I find myself repeatedly returning to the meaning of love. I have been a practicing Buddhist for the last four decades and a practicing psychologist and a writer for almost three of them. In more ways than I can say, my dedication to these disciplines has allowed me to survive and remain vital. They have also helped me discern the core nature of Love (whether for a partner, a parent, a child, or a friend). It is: the ability to be a warmly attuned witness who accepts the other's foibles, takes pleasure in the other's being, and is dedicated to refining his or her views of the other and one's self until they are truly trustworthy. No matter how many financial, physical or other resources a partner or parent may provide, what is worthy of being called "love" always includes the aim of coming to know the particularity - the nobility and frailty - of our beloved. Rather than being emotionally managed, manipulated, used or tolerated, love means being interested in the beloved as a person with his or her own subjective world. This kind of love--and only this kind of love--endures as conditions and demands change in our emotional landscape. It is not simply a feeling; it is a discipline and a life-long spiritual pursuit of self-knowledge through accepting knowledge of others.
On this blog, with your help, I will chart a path that shows how we move from our first encounters with love (relating to a sibling, falling in love, having a baby, meeting a new friend) through a series of faltering engagements (repeated attempts to see the beloved through the mist of our own emotional obstacles and delusions) to the realized vow to remain a warmly attuned witness--even when cherishing those we love becomes a one-way street. I will talk about the obstacles to true love, the gap between people, and working with anger and hurt. I will draw on my experiences of many years as a couples therapist (Ed and I invented, practiced, taught and supervised Dialogue Therapy for Couples), a Jungian analyst, a psychologist, a Buddhist practitioner and now a Buddhist teacher. Together, we will look honestly at the paradoxes and demands of loving truly and deeply. I look forward to our journey together.
