People become so wearied of the cycles and dead ends of romance that they begin to wonder if there is such a thing as “love.” There is. But sometimes we have to make profound changes of attitude before we can see what love is and make room for love in our lives.
Love betweeen human beings is one of the absolute realities of human nature. Just as soul—Psyche—was one of the gods of the Greek pantheon, so was Love: His name was Eros. For the Greeks understood that love, being an archetype of the collective unconscious, is both eternal and universal in humankind. And for the Greeks, that qualified Love as a god.
Because love is an archetype, it has its own character, its own traits, its own “personality.” Like a god, love behaves as a “person” in the unconscious, a separate being in the psyche. Love is distinct from my ego; love was here before my ego came into the world, and love will be here after my ego departs. Yet love is something or “someone” who lives within me. Love is a force that acts from within, that enables my ego to look outside itself, to see my fellow humans as something to be valued and cherished, rather than used.
Therefore, when I say that “I love,” it is not I who love, but, in reality, Love who acts through me. Love is not so much something I do as something that I am. Love is not a doing but a state of being—a relatedness, a connectedness to another mortal, an identification with her or him that simply flows within me and through me, independent of my intentions or my efforts.
This state of being may express itself in what I do or in how I treat people, but it can never be reduced to a set of “doings,” or acts. It is a feeling within. More often than we realize, love works its divine alchemy best when we follow the advice of Shakespeare’s Cordelia: “Love, and keep silent.”
Love exists, regardless of our opinions about what it ought to be. No matter how many fabrications or how much selfishness we justify in the name of “love,” love still keeps its unchanging character. Its existence and its nature do not depend on my illusions, my opinions, or my counterfeits. Love is different from what my culture has led me to expect, different from what my ego wants, different from the sentimental froth and inflated ecstasies I’ve been taught to hope for; but love turns out to be real; it turns out to be what I am, rather than what my ego demands.
We need to know this about love. Otherwise we could never stand to look honestly at our self-deceptions. At times people say: “Don’t make me see my illusions; if you take away my illusions, there will be nothing left!” We seem to think of love as “man-made,” as though we invented it in our minds. Even though romantic love has not turned out to be what we thought, there is still a human love that is inherent in us, and this love will be with us even after our projections, our illusions, and our artifices have all passed away.
Human love is so obscured by the inflations and commotions of romance that we almost never look for love in its own right, and we hardly know what to look for when we do search. But as we learn love’s characteristics and attitudes, we can begin to see love within us—revealed in our feelings, in the spontaneous flow of warmth that surges toward another person, in the small, unnoticed acts of relatedness that make up the secret fabric of our daily lives.
Love is the power within us that affirms and values another human being as he or she is. Human love affirms that person who is actually there, rather than the ideal we would like him or her to be or the projection that flows from our minds. Love is the inner god who opens our blind eyes to the beauty, value, and quality of the other person. Love causes us to value that person as a total, individual self, and this means that we accept the negative side as well as the positive, the imperfections as well as the admirable qualities. When one truly loves the human being rather than the projection, one loves the shadow just as one loves the rest. One accepts the other person’s totality.
Human love causes a man to see the intrinsic value in a woman; therefore love leads him to honor and serve her, rather than to try to use her for his ego’s purposes. When love is guiding him, he is concerned with her needs and her well-being, not fixated on his own wants and whims.
Love alters our sense of importance. Through love we see that the other individual has as great a value in the cosmos as our own; it becomes just as important to us that he or she should be whole, should live fully, should find the joy of life, as that our own needs be met.
In the world of the unconscious, love is one of those great psychological forces that have the power to transform the ego. Love is the one power that awakens the ego to the existence of something outside itself, outside its plans, outside its empire, outside its security. Love relates the ego not only to the rest of the human race, but to the soul and to all the gods of the inner world.
Thus love is by its very nature the exact opposite of egocentricity. We use the word love loosely. We use it to dignify any number of demands for attention, power, security, or entertainment from other people. But when we are looking out for our own self-styled “needs,” our own desires, our own dreams, and our power over people, this is not love. Love is utterly distinct from our ego’s desires and power plays. It leads in a different lirection: toward the goodness, the value, and the needs of the people around us.
In its very essence, love is an appreciation, a recognition of another’s value: It moves a man to honor a woman rather than use her, to ask himself how he might serve her. And if this woman is relating to him through love, she will take the same attitude toward him.
The archetypal nature of love is perhaps nowhere better expressed than in the simple language of Saint Paul:
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not vaunt itself, is not puffed up…. Love does not seek her own way, is not easily provoked, is not anxious to suspect evil…bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail, whether there be tongues, they shall cease, whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
Here is a brief and eloquent statement of the difference between an ego left to its own devices and an ego under the influence of love. My ego is concerned only with itself; but “love suffers long and is kind.” My ego is envious, always seeking to inflate itself with illusions of absolute power and control, but “love does not vaunt itself, is not puffed up.” My ego, left to its ego-centeredness, will always betray, but “love never fails.” My ego only knows how to affirm itself and its desires, but love “seeks not her own way.” Love affirms all of life: “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things.”
This is why we have taken exception to romantic love, and this is the main distinction between human love and romantic love: Romance must, by its very nature, deteriorate into egotism. For romance is not a love that is directed at another human being; the passion of romance is always directed at our own projections, our own expectations, our own fantasies. In a very real sense, it is a love not of another person, but of ourselves.
It should now be clear that to the extent that a relationship is founded on projection the element of human love is lacking. To be in love with someone we do not know as a person, but are attracted to because they reflect back to us the image of the god or goddess in our souls, is, in a sense, to be in love with oneself, not with the other person. In spite of the seeming beauty of the love fantasies we may have in this state of being in love, we can, in fact, be in a thoroughly selfish state of mind.
Real love begins only when one person comes to know another for who he or she really is as a human being, and begins to like and care for that human being.
…To be capable of real love means becoming mature, with realistic expectations of the other person. It means accepting responsibility for our own happiness or unhappiness, and neither expecting the other person to make us happy nor blaming that person for our bad moods and frustrations. (Sanford, Invisible Partners).
When we are focused on our projections, we are focused on ourselves. And the passion and love we feel for our projections is a reflexive, circular love that is directed inevitably back to ourselves.
But here, again, we run headlong into the paradox of romantic love. The paradox is that we should love our projections, and that we should also love ourselves. In romance the love of self becomes distorted; it becomes egocentric and its original nature is lost. But if we learn to seek it on the correct level, the love of self is a true and valid love: It is the second great stream of energy that flows into romantic love, human love’s archetypal mate, the other face of Eros.
We need to revere the unconscious parts of ourselves that we project. When we love our projections, when we honor our romantic ideals and fantasies, we affirm infinitely precious dimensions of our total selves. The riddle is how to love one’s self without falling into egotism.
As we learn the geography of the human psyche, with its islands of consciousness, its multilayered and multicentered structure, we see that the love of the total self can not be a centering of the universe on our egos. Love of self is the ego’s seeking after the other “persons” of the inner world, who hide within us. It is ego’s longing for the larger dimensions of the unconscious, its willingness to open itself to the other parts of our total being, and to their points of view, their values, and their needs.
Understood in this way, our love of self is also the “divine” love: our search for the ultimate meaning, for our souls, for the revelation of God. This understanding returns us to the words of Clement of Alexandria:
Therefore, as it seems, it is the greatest of all disciplines to know oneself; for when a man knows himself, he knows God.
The fault in romantic love is not that we love ourselves, but that we love ourselves wrongly. By trying to revere the unconscious through our romantic projections on other people, we miss the reality hidden in those projections: We don’t see that it is our own selves we are searching for.
The task of salvaging love from the swamps of romance begins with a shift of vision toward the inside; we have to wake up to the inner world; we have to learn how to live the “love of self” as an inner experience. But then it is time to redirect our gaze outward again, toward physical people and the relationships we make with them—we must learn the principles of the “human” love.
Many years ago a wise friend gave me a name for human love. She called it “stirring-the-oatmeal” love. She was right: Within this phrase, if we will humble ourselves enough to look, is the very essence of what human love is, and it shows us the principal differences between human love and romance.
Stirring oatmeal is an humble act—not exciting or thrilling. But it symbolizes a relatedness that brings love down to earth. It represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks: earning a living, living within a budget, putting out the garbage, feeding the baby in the middle of the night. To “stir the oatmeal” means to find the relatedness, the value, even the beauty, in simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama, an entertainment, or an extraordinary intensity in everything. Like the rice hulling of the Zen monks, the spinning wheel of Ghandi, the tent making of Saint Paul, it represents the discovery of the sacred in the midst of the humble and ordinary.
Jung once said that feeling is a matter of the small. And in human love, we can see that it is true. The real relatedness between two people is experienced in the small tasks they do together: the quiet conversation when the day’s upheavals are at rest, the soft word of understanding, the daily companionship, the encouragement offered in a difficult moment, the small gift when least expected, the spontaneous gesture of love.
When a couple are genuinely related to each other, they are willing to enter into the whole spectrum of human life together. They transform even the unexciting, difficult, and mundane things into a joyful and fulfilling component of life. By contrast, romantic love can only last so long as a couple are “high” on one another, so long as the money lasts and the entertainments are exciting. “Stirring the oatmeal” means that two people take their love off the airy level of exciting fantasy and convert it into earthy, practical immediacy.
Love is content to do many things that ego is bored with. Love is willing to work with the other person’s moods and unreasonableness. Love is willing to fix breakfast and balance the checkbook. Love is willing to do these “oatmeal” things of life because it is related to a person, not a projection.
Human love sees another person as an individual and makes an individualized relationship to him or her. Romantic love sees the other person only as a role player in the drama.
A man’s human love desires that a woman become a complete and independent person and encourages her to be herself. Romantic love only affirms what he would like her to be, so that she could be identical to anima. So long as romance rules a man, he affirms a woman only insofar as she is willing to change, so that she may reflect his projected ideal. Romance is never happy with the other person just as he or she is.
Human love necessarily includes friendship: friendship within relationship, within marriage, between husband and wife. When a man and a woman are truly friends, they know each other’s difficult points and weaknesses, but they are not inclined to stand in judgment on them. They are more concerned with helping each other and enjoying each other than they are with finding fault.
Friends, genuine friends, are like Kaherdin: They want to affirm rather than to judge; they don’t coddle, but neither do they dwell on our inadequacies. Friends back each other up in the tough times, help each other with the sordid and ordinary tasks of life. They don’t impose impossible standards on each other, they don’t ask for perfection, and they help each other rather than grind each other down with demands.
In romantic love there is no friendship. Romance and friendship are utterly opposed energies, natural enemies with completely opposing motives. Sometimes people say: “I don’t want to be friends with my husband [or wife]; it would take all the romance out of our marriage.” It is true: Friendship does take the artificial drama and intensity out of a relationship, but it also takes away the egocentricity and the impossibility and replaces the drama with something human and real.
If a man and woman are friends to each other, then they are “neighbors” as well as lovers; their relationship is suddenly subject to Christ’s dictum: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” One of the glaring contradictions in romantic love is that so many couples treat their friends with so much more kindness, consideration, generosity, and forgiveness than they ever give to one another! When people are with their friends, they are charming, helpful, and courteous. But when they come home, they often vent all their anger, resentments, moods, and frustrations on each other. Strangely, they treat their friends better than they do each other.
When two people are “in love,” people commonly say that they are “more than just friends.” But in the long run, they seem to treat each other as less than friends. Most people think that being “in love” is a much more intimate, much more “meaningful,” relationship than “mere” friendship. Why, then, do couples refuse each other the selfless love, the kindness and good will, that they readily give to their friends? People can’t ask of their friends that they carry all their projections, be scapegoats for all their moods, keep them feeling happy, and make life complete for them. Why do couples impose these demands on each other? Because the cult of romance teaches us that we have the right to expect that all our projections will be borne—all our desires satisfied, and all our fantasies made to come true—in the person we are “in love” with. In one of the Hindu rites of marriage, the bride and groom make to each other a solemn statement: “You will be my best friend.” Western couples need to learn to be friends, to live with each other in a spirit of friendship, to take the quality of friendship as a guide through the tangles we have made of love.
We can learn much of human love by learning to look with an open mind at Oriental cultures and their attitudes.
During the time I spent in India and Japan, I saw marriages and love relationships that are not based at all on romance but on a warm, devoted, and enduring love. Hindus are instinctive masters of the art of human love. I think this is because they have never taken on romantic love as a way of trying to relate to each other. Hindus automatically make the differentiation that we have completely muddled in the West: They know how to worship anima, the archetypes, the gods, as inner realities; they know how to keep their experience of the divine side of life distinct from their personal relationships and marriages.
Hindus take the inner world on a symbolic level; they translate the inner archetypes into images and external symbols through temple art and allegorical ritual. But they don’t project the inner gods onto their husbands and wives. They take the personified archetypes as symbols of another world and take each other as human beings; as a result, they don’t put impossible demands on each other and they don’t disappoint each other.
A Hindu man does not ask of his wife that she be anima or that she take him off to another world or that she embody all the intensity and perfection of his inner life. Since lyrical religious experience is still part of their culture, Hindus do not try to make their marriages and human relationships into a substitute for communion with the soul. They find their gods in the temple, in meditation, or sometimes in the guru; they don’t try to make the outer relationship serve the role of the inner one.
At first a Westerner is confused by the Hindu way; their love doesn’t seem to be bubbling with enough heat and intensity to suit the Western romantic taste. But if one observes patiently, one is startled out of Western prejudices and begins to question the assumption that romance is the only “true love.” There is a quiet but steady lovingness in Hindu marriages, a profound affection. There is stability: They are not caught in the dramatic oscillations between “in love” and “out of love,” adoration and disillusionment, that Western couples are.
In the traditional Hindu marriage, a man’s commitment to his wife does not depend on his staying “in love” with her. Since he was never “in love” in the first place, there is no way he can fall “out of love.” His relationship to his wife is based on loving her, not on being “in love” with an ideal that he projects onto her. His relationship is not going to collapse because one day he falls “out of love,” or because he meets another woman who catches his projection. He is committed to a woman and a family, not to a projection.
We think of ourselves as more sophisticated than the “simple” Hindus. But, by comparison with a Hindu, the average Western man is like an ox with a ring in his nose, following his projection around from one woman to another, making no true relationship or commitment to any. In the area of human feeling, love, and relationship, Hindus have evolved a highly differentiated, subtle, and refined consciousness. In these matters, they do better than we.
One of the most striking and surprising things I observed among traditional Hindus was how bright, happy, and psychologically healthy their children are. Children in Hindu families are not neurotic; they are not torn within themselves as so many Western children are. They are bathed constantly in human affection, and they sense a peaceful flow of affection between their mother and father. They sense the stability, the enduring quality of their family life. Their parents are committed permanently; they don’t hear their parents asking themselves whether their marriage is “going to work out”; separation and divorce do not float as specters in the air.
For us Westerners there is no turning back of the clock. We can’t go the way of the Hindus; we can’t solve our Western dilemma by doing an imitation of other people’s customs or other people’s attitudes. We can’t pretend that we have an Eastern psyche rather than a Western psyche. We have to deal with our own Western unconscious and our own Western wounds; we have to find the healing balm within our own Western soul. We have drunk the love potion and plunged into the romantic era of our evolution, and the only way out is by the path that leads straight ahead. We can’t go back, and we may not linger.
But we can learn from the Eastern cultures to stand outside ourselves, outside our assumptions and our beliefs, just long enough to see ourselves in a new perspective. We can learn what it is to approach love with a different set of attitudes, unburdened by the dogmas of our culture.
We can learn that human relationship is inseparable from friendship and commitment. We can learn that the essence of love is not to use the other to make us happy but to serve and affirm the one we love. And we can discover, to our surprise, that what we have needed more than anything was not so much to be loved, as to love.