How to know what love is

For some reason, it has been a bad month for many of my friends.  A lot of people who have been in serious relationships (some engaged) for the past year or more have broken up and gone their separate ways. Maybe the weather has gotten cooler and passion dies when signs of life quiet down. Maybe days are getting shorter and that makes us feel more angst. Maybe as Thanksgiving and Christmas draw nearer and nearer, it’s soon going to be prime meeting-the-family-time and if you don’t break up now you’ll prob have to wait till after Valentine’s Day. For someone whose heart is set like cold jello, that’s helluva long time.

On one hand, it is heart wrenching to watch them suffer, but on the other hand, I always say, sooner rather than later, you know?

Love is one of those beasts we can try to tame but then as soon as we do it dies. Like faith, defining it means reducing it to merely an aspect of the whole. And as soon as we do, it becomes almost necessary to worship it like a religion, thus we often find ourselves bound and blind to possibilities outside of our normal range of imagination. As an ideal, love conjures a hypnotic concoction of loss of self, of wild dreams, of grandiosity – the society we’re raised in makes us believe that these affiliated notions of “love” constitute it entirely. We proactively look for these notions- for the fluttering of the heart, for serendipity, for stories, for The Look, for grand gestures. And when there are signs of it missing from our relationships or our pursuit of these relationships, we write off whatever is in front of us as “not meant to be”.

This is not what love is. If you are still looking for this and you believe this is love, you’ll either end up very hurt or end up hurting a lot of people. 

Typically, in my posts I offer a list of pointers  – 1, 2, 3, bold, underlined, indented. But for this particular post, there really is only one message:

Love is not really about you. 

I have been reading this book by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh recently. It is this palm-sized little thing called “How to Love“. In it, he says:

“To love is not to possess the other person or to consume all their attention and love. To love is to offer the other person joy and a balm for their suffering. This capacity is what we have to learn and cultivate.”

When we make love to be about ourselves, several things start to happen:

• We begin to have endless criteria on our list, requirements for the person that we think we can love, without so much considering what makes us so special that they should love us back
• We begin to expect more from our relationships, and this makes us erroneously believe that the stake for being in the relationship is now higher. We have more negative reactions to the other person, sweat the small stuff, and poison the kindness we once shared with the other person.
• We begin to think we deserve more, and start to lose appreciation and compassion for the other person that is so key in continuously cultivating love.
• We begin to fear losing the other person. We try to control them, “fix” them so they can be “better”, or, we might realize that they’re wrong for us but still refuse to let them go.

None of these behaviors are indications of love. You may think it is because you tell yourself you care (a lot!!), but what you really care about is you, not the other person who is on the receiving end of any love you have to give.

I know, you’re probably sitting there going, “This is stupid. Fuck you.” I don’t blame you. It is hard. Human beings are inherently selfish. I only ask that you think about this a bit more. Take some time, ponder it over. Given what happened in Paris, Beirut, and everywhere else in the world recently, love is so heavily needed in the world we live in, now more than ever.

Give, be a balm for someone else’s suffering. Be a source of light, not darkness. 

XOXO,

V.

Why you won’t find the love you’re looking for

Displays of Affection, Jean-Jacques Sempé

Dear everyone, my sincere apologies for the lack of updates for the past while. A lot has happened in my own life since then, but I won’t bore you with the details. I hope your summer has been a gorgeous and relaxing one. I hope you’ve been breathing deeply every day and not sweating the small stuff.

I want to write about love briefly. Last night I watched Maleficent for the first time, and when it spoke about how “true love does not exist”, that really affected me. These days I see so many of my friends struggle with dating, with break-ups, with reconciling the “is” with the “should be”. Part of it makes me realize it is human nature for us to struggle with the anti-logic properties of emotion, but part of it also makes me sympathize with them because the problems of love are uniquely universal.

So without further ado, some of my thoughts on love you might find interesting/helpful/controversial

1. The love you are looking for does not exist 

One does not simply look for love. Rather, you look for a person to get along with, who can inspire you to be your best. When you proactively look for love, you’re really projecting your experiences, expectations, and fantasies into a fictional scenario – a scenario whose outcome is manipulated in your mind, as we tend to be overly optimistic about the future.

If you tend to make decisions based on past tangible experience, you need to know that no future man or woman will ever fully possess all the good qualities in a previous SO that you hope to retain, so that you can recreate all the good things you had while purging the bad, the uncomfortable, the regrettable. You might succeed sometimes, but chances are you’ll quickly become disillusioned by your partner’s slew of other negative qualities, which you may soon find intolerable because you had set your expectations too high.

If you tend to make decisions based on intuition, you need to know that this imaginary person you crave for in your dreams but has never met in real life, is more a reflection of your own self than of your circumstances. He or she is a projection of those dark corners of your psyche that you’re wholly unaware of as you go about your day-to-day activities – your fears, your shadows, your ego, your dreams. You might dwell long enough on certain superficial characteristics to sometimes succeed in finding someone who possess them, but chances are you’ll quickly become disillusioned by your partner’s slew of other negative qualities, which you may soon find intolerable because you had set your expectations too high.

2. The love you have needs to be cultivated 

One of the questions people often ask to reaffirm that the love they have is “true love”, is this: “Does he/she make you happy?” First of all, how selfish ARE you? Why is it anybody else’s responsibility to make YOU happy, ever? Especially if you can’t make yourself happy, why should the person you’re with take on a burden you can’t even take on for yourself?

The kind of love that makes you “happy” is not love, but infatuation. It isn’t the person who’s making you happy, it’s the idea of falling and being in love with this person. The subject that owns all of these activities and emotions has nothing to do with the other person, and everything to do with you. The sad truth is that at some point this infatuation will die. If you’re lucky, at this point you’ll stop being IN LOVE and start to LOVE. Those are very different things. To be “in love” is about what you want, to ‘love” is about how you can give freely to another without expecting anything in return.

For me, the act of love is founded on the basis of respect. Point blank, if you cannot respect the other person, whether for the majority of his/her being or holistically as a whole, then you’re screwed. You might try to justify for your decision to be with him/her in all kinds of messed up ways that ultimately promotes inequality in the relationship, a lot of negative power dynamics, and gaps in understanding and empathy.

3. Love is not something you can hold onto forever 

Life is complicated and things change, all the time. People come, people go. At its best, the love you have will transform into something deeper, more spiritual, more grand. At its worst it will die, and you’ll fill the void with other kinds of love, some of which you didn’t know existed. Either way, you have to let it carry you, not the other way around, into the future. Let it take you to wherever, because at one point you had signed up for it, and you shouldn’t regret anything because at that point in time it was exactly what you had wanted.

Because love is never stationary, it is also difficult to be kept at equilibrium. There will always be balances of tension, things that tuck on your heartstrings that are good, bad, and ugly. Part of the challenge – and the fun – is to bravely navigate these points of tension, and teeter-totter through the days and the months in order to grow it into something more beautiful.

When we first open ourselves up to someone else, there is always a moment when suddenly we come out of our armors and once again become vulnerable. That moment to me is always terrifying. We’ve all been through the disappointment, the struggles, the confusion, the hurt, and the last thing we’d ever want is to go through all of that again. So this final, third point has been giving me courage to move forward with my own life – knowing that whatever happen will happen, and that in the meantime, you have given love and learned in the process.

——

So that’s all I have to say. These past few weeks, one of my grandparents in China has been physically unwell. Right now she’s got most of her extended family by her bed, taking care of her day and night. As a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about death and loss, and I think, at the end of the day, whether is it parental love, friendship love, romantic love, or any other kind of love, it really is all the same. And we do it because we are human, and we do it because there really is no other way.

Love,

V