In its many manifestations, love is the foundation of a meaningful life. The body is the vehicle of human love, and it’s helpful to observe the effects of physical touch on emotional life. In this chapter, we’ll explore how we reconcile physical needs with the spiritual dimension of love and how in sexual relationships we can cultivate intimacy without a loss of desire or passion. By considering the effects of attachment on human love, and the difference between attachment and commitment, you’ll see that they prompt different kinds of passion. We’ll look at ways of responding to passion without falling into addiction and how love, in all its forms, requires forgiveness to survive. Without forgiveness, we are stuck in the past. Love is always happening now.
Without the ability to nurture, care, and think of others, life would be drained of significance. Love in the broadest sense of honoring the humanity of others and upholding the sacredness of the world is the foundation of a life that matters. If we can’t open our hearts with a measure of unconditional love, then no authentic awakening happens.
As we saw in the lesson on the mothering gaze, love begins in the body. Long before language entered our life, our body began its education in affection, empathy, and compassion. By mirroring our caregiver’s love toward us, we learned to exhibit that care toward others. Through the power of touch, our body absorbed the kindness of others and located a stable psychological base. The way we were physically handled as children determines a lot about how we handle others later in life. As we grow into puberty, this need to be touched reaches a new crescendo. Hormones propel our bodies toward one another as the desires to be touched, held, and known increases our longing for emotional connection.
In relationships that are romantic or erotic, the physical body factors into love in ways that can be confusing. What does it mean to love with the body? Can higher emotions be channeled through the flesh? How do we reconcile the paradox of so-called higher and lower urges? Is there a way to combine our creature needs with calls of heart and spirit, making the body an ally of love rather than its saboteur?
These questions have long compelled philosophers and psychologists to study the conundrums of love, desire, and meaning. Esther Perel, a prominent voice in intimacy studies, writes that “the very ingredients that nurture love—mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other—are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.” The erotic body speaks its own language and has its own requirements and limitations. By familiarizing yourself with the vernacular of the heart, grammar of the body, and syntax of the spirit, you take an important step toward self-understanding: learning to love as a physical being. Writing can help you articulate the paradoxes that this involves. When I ask my students to write about love as it relates to the physical body, their responses vary tremendously.
Marlene: The body gets in the way of love. I’ve been with my husband for thirty-two years and sex has never been our best part. This sounds strange to say but I never feel more distant from him than after we have sex. I don’t feel like I exist for him.
I can’t connect emotionally to my boyfriend without sex. When we don’t make love, I feel insecure. It’s easy to lie with words but the body always tell the truth. We all have wandering eyeballs. If he can’t bring the attention back to me, I know there’s something wrong.
Deborah:
I’m conflicted when it comes to women. I objectify them and love them at the same time. I’m spiritually drawn to females till the minute we make physical contact; then it changes to an animal thing. And maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. But maybe there is.
David:
I’m at a point in my life when sex without love doesn’t interest me. Been there, done that. If I don’t care about somebody, why bother? I know a lot of men who don’t agree and think it’s worth it just to have sex. I don’t like that feeling anymore.
Hector:
As you explore your thoughts and feelings about love, it will become clear that erotic experience—in its myriad forms—has had a dramatic impact on your sense of self. The body is always part of love, since without incarnation love can’t exist, and this is fascinating territory to mine for your core beliefs and narratives. See what emerges from the stories you tell about your own body in the act of loving.
Without the ability to open your heart, no awakening can happen. This must involve the physical body.
Through the power of touch, our body absorbs the kindness of others and locates a stable psychological base.
In erotic relationship, the body speaks its own language and has its own requirements and limitations.
As you explore your thoughts and feelings about love with writing, it becomes clear that love—in its myriad forms—has had an impact on your sense of self.
These prompts will help you identify how physical touch has informed your emotional life and the interplay between love and erotic attraction.
As you recognize that love begins in the body—as physical experience, not a concept—you can begin to see how emotion and story are different as well. How you tell the story of love determines how you live it in the body. You can choose to open in love’s direction, giving freedom and space to your beloved or you can close down, cling, and suffocate a partner. When the body clings in this way, it strangles love, causing pain to yourself and others. In the next section, we’ll examine the difference between love and attachment in emotional life.
The ability to allow separation from those we love is critical to a relationship’s health. Without space, love becomes codependency and entrapment replaces a sense of freedom. And yet, love without attachment can seem impossibile. As fragile, imperfect, inconstant beings full of fears and insecurities, we habitually cling to the people we love. We hold them as close to us as possible and suffer when we’re apart. When I spent time with the Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein, he offered some perspective on this.
We assume that clutching and caring go hand in hand. We assume that attachment equates with love. But when we look at these two forces closely, we realize how different they actually are. When we feel most loving, we feel most openhearted. Attachment isn’t a giving energy. When we’re attached, it’s a subtle contraction, the heart holding on and saying, “Please don’t leave me.” Attachment wants things to stay the same, especially in relation to us. Since everyone and everything is always changing, this is obviously doomed. Commitment, on the other hand, does not say that things must stay the same for us to be happy, rather that we will abide with ourselves affectionately throughout these changes. Otherwise, we only create more suffering.
Tina was addicted to suffering from longing in love relationships. This included the people she slept with, and extended to friends and family as well. Her longing story went something like this: “Everybody is going to leave me. If I don’t lock the door, they’ll disappear. If I look away, they’ll be gone. So I’ll squeeze them tight and not let them go. That’s how they’ll know how much I love them.” But her clinginess was precisely what drove people away. Tina knew this in her heart but couldn’t help herself. When she came to my class, heartbroken over her latest friendship break, she wrote this in response to a question about her greatest fear in love relationships.
It’s like being in a flood and the river’s got you and you’re trying to hold on but you can’t. And you see them going off in the distance, downriver, and you’re broken up inside but the river keeps pushing you farther apart. You can’t stop them from disappearing and then you never see them again. This is a nightmare that plays over and over in my mind.
I encouraged Tina to write about how this nightmare image connected to actual experience. When I asked Tina if she had lost anyone in her life, she wrote about a scapegoating experience when she was rejected by a group of friends after being blamed for something she didn’t do. “Overnight, they all stopped speaking to me. Bam. Nothing I said made any difference. The more I protested, the guiltier I seemed. They dropped me like a hot potato. My worst nightmare come true. I felt like I’d lost my whole world and don’t think I can open my heart again.”
This was Tina’s immediate trauma that confirmed the fear story. For the next few months, she explored this story in depth: how she clung to people for dear life, how her heart was obstructed by fear, how she pressured people not to change by focusing on her needs over theirs. She realized that although her feelings were real, the story behind them was fiction—a self-fulfilling prophecy. Until she learned to stand alone in her fear, without looking to another to take it away, she’d be caught in a never-ending loop of dread and disappointment. Eventually I asked her to rewrite her nightmare to see if it looked any different.
I’m in a river, but the water is clear and it’s now moving slowly. There are people around me and our bodies touch and we help each other float. It’s a beautiful feeling of being together in the same element, even when we aren’t touching. I don’t need to hold them back. I can’t control the river and I don’t want to. I breathe deeply and easily and look at the sky as we all meander downstream together.
By reimaging her story, Tina stepped from the river of obsession into the Witness seat. She touched on the essence of love, which is the willingness to release a beloved, and in so doing began to release the demon of clinging. We can all do this by acknowledging our fears of abandonment and the disappearance of love. These deepening practices propel movement from bondage to freedom.
The ability to separate from a partner is critical to a healthy relationship. Without space, love becomes codependency and entrapment replaces a sense of freedom.
As fragile, imperfect, inconstant beings full of fears and insecurities, we habitually cling to the people we love.
Attachment wants things to stay the same. Commitment, on the other hand, does not say that things must stay the same for us to be happy.
When we release the demon of clinging, we acknowledge our fears of abandonment and the disappearance of love.
Are you aware of unhealthy emotional attachment in your own relationships? Do you see how commitment is different from attachment? These questions will help you find out.
No one is completely fearless when it comes to love. Acknowledging how, when, and why you tend to cling—bringing about pain in love relationships—is a boon to emotional self-awareness. It will also help you appreciate passion, whether it’s erotic or not, while maintaining the Witness perspective.
Attachment and commitment represent different approaches to passion. Attachment-based love stems from the passion to possess, control, and consume. Commitment-based love arises from the passion to bring freedom, faith, and autonomy to oneself and others. One passion is destructive, the other constructive. One leads to fear, the other to joy.
Passion gives meaning to our life, as we “cannot live on bread alone.” The drive toward physical survival runs alongside cravings for quality of life, ego fulfillment, peak experience, as well as emotional and spiritual transcendence. Passion helps us attain these heights, but when constructive passions are beyond our reach, we’ll settle for destructive ones. As psychologist Erich Fromm says, “The truth is that all human passions, both the ‘good’ and the ‘evil,’ can be understood only as a person’s attempt to make sense of his life and transcend banal, merely life-sustaining existence.”
Passion is a double-edged sword. Anyone who’s pursued an unrequited love or fallen prey to the dark sides of love, including possessiveness, jealousy, aggression, or competition, knows this to be true. If you’re like Tina and believe that love is made up of suffering, intensity, conflict, and addiction, your relationships are likely to be fueled by destructive passion. While it can feel irresistible, it does not lead to sustainable satisfaction. If you believe that love breeds contentment, harmony, and trust, you’re more likely to be animated by constructive passion, which strengthens your ability to care for others and be cared for by them. Consider these two descriptions of passion from students enrolled in a course about the mystery of love. They each shared a love story that was also a peak experience.
I knew there was something off about him the first time I saw him. But I found him incredibly attractive, too. He was selfish, unavailable, and much too young. Also, he seemed to mostly want sex, which was fine with me. I needed some danger and risk in my life. I thought: What’s the worst that could happen? A one-night stand? A short, disastrous romance? What the hell, life is short and I’m not getting any younger. The sex was probably the best of my life. I got addicted to the feel of him and, after a while, I’d meet him anywhere and anytime. I knew I was demeaning myself but it felt delicious at the time.
Michelle:
She came into my life like a breath of fresh air. Completely unlike most of the women I dated, who were so screwed up I ended up being their therapist. She was successful and independent, and this turned me on like crazy. We were equals and she really got me. I felt stronger and smarter when we were together. I could see a future before us and making that happen became my mission. How could I get her to marry me? She’d already been divorced and didn’t seem eager to go around that rodeo again. That was three years ago and I’m still waiting. She still excites the hell out of me and I’d rather not be married to her than be settled down with somebody else.
Robert:
The difference between these two passions is clear. The woman in the first story was drawn to the object of desire for superficial, dead-end reasons. She was looking for kicks and novelty to escape from a predictable life. The man in the second story was passionately drawn to his girlfriend by a sense of possibility and being with a peer. He was strengthened by his passion instead of depleted; it gave him courage and staying power.
If you’re like most of us, you’ve been driven by both kinds of passion in varying situations and are aware of how different they feel. Look carefully at what type of passion you’re drawn to and the stories that grow out of it. These narratives will give you insight into the way passion works in your life, how it helps and how it harms.
Attachment-based love stems from the passion to possess, control, and consume. Commitment-based love arises from the passion to bring freedom, faith, and autonomy to oneself and others. One leads to fear, the other to joy.
Passion gives meaning to our lives.
We settle for destructive passions when constructive ones are beyond our reach.
Believing that love is proven by conflict and addiction to the other person, your relationship is likely to be fueled by destructive passion, while the belief that love breeds harmony and trust is more likely to be animated by constructive passion.
These prompts will lead you toward insights about constructive and destructive passions, and how both contribute to the story of meaning in your life.
Having familiarized yourself with the dual nature of passion, and identified certain key patterns in your emotional history, you can now consider love and forgiveness, and how you can’t have one without the other if you’re telling the truth.
Love requires trust and space to grow, which is why if relationships are to survive, we need to be able to forgive. What do I mean by forgiveness, exactly? This is a tricky question best answered by looking first at what forgiveness is not. Forgiveness has nothing to do with condoning misdeeds, whitewashing feelings, or resigning yourself to mistreatment. Forgiveness does not depend on forgetting, making things right, or carrying on with relationships that have passed their expiration date. Forgiveness doesn’t call for communication with the injuring party, or depend on getting an apology.
Instead, forgiveness is an inside job, first and foremost. Psychologist Al Siebert reports that one survivor of severe abuse best put it this way: “Forgiving is a selfish act to free yourself from being controlled by your past.” Your intention is not to let the other person off the hook; instead you let yourself off the hook with forgiveness, in order to move forward in life. This is an important point that feels counterintuitive. It calls on us to practice against the grain, as Buddhism teaches, to reverse our normal tendency to blame the other, demand atonement, seek revenge, and hold a grudge. Each step we take toward forgiveness in love builds our self-respect, helping us realize how big our heart is and how flexible it can be. Forgiveness requires courage, a word that comes from French and means “big heart.”
Taking the high road in love is rarely easy. But when we come to understand forgiveness as a form of self-care, this awareness softens our resistance to letting go and reduces the desire for payback. We come to see clearly that, as the saying goes, resentment is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other person to die. A lot of people die waiting for forgiveness to happen, not knowing it was in their power all along.
Why is forgiveness a part of love? Because every one of us is imperfect and bound to make mistakes sooner or later. And when that happens, it’s up to us to prevent our heart from shutting down. I learned this when a love affair of mine went belly up in a hurtful way. This passion had been destructive from the start, marked by frequent upheaval and conflict, and had I been less controlling and stubborn, I would have walked away after a few weeks. But it went on for more than a year before a disaster happened, which left me reeling and determined not to fall for passion again. I was bitter, angry, and wanted revenge. For a couple of weeks, I stewed and fumed.
I was furiously scribbling in my journal, asking myself what had gone wrong and what I could do about it. I wrote about where the pain was coming from. I felt that I’d lost a piece of myself. I believed this pain had turned me into damaged goods by permanently scarring me, and compromised my ability to love again. This was my story about the pain. Then I had a revelation: I recognized that it was a story—not a fact—and this recognition made way for truth. I wasn’t diminished in the least. My heart could remain as open as ever. In response to this painful betrayal, I chose to continue to love my ex. No offense in the world could stop me from loving. I closed my journal and realized I needed nothing from this other person, who I hoped to never see again. This freedom to forgive was a rite of passage, as I released the ancient, hackneyed story about how a spurned lover is supposed to behave.
What stories do you hold about love and forgiveness? What stops you from letting yourself off the hook, no longer controlled by your past? These prompts will help you answer these potentially life-changing questions for yourself.
Love requires trust and space to grow, which is why if relationships are to survive, we need to be able to forgive.
Forgiveness lets us off the hook to move forward in life. Each step we take toward forgiveness builds our self-respect and helps us realize how big our heart is and how flexible it can be.
When we come to understand forgiveness as a form of self-care, this awareness softens our resistance to letting go and reduces the desire for payback.
Every one of us is imperfect and bound to mess up sooner or later. When that happens, it’s up to us to prevent our hearts from shutting down.
It can be easier to write about forgiveness than to practice it. Writing is a dress rehearsal for forgiveness, an agreement you make with yourself not to be controlled by your past. This is an important step on your journey that’s often not easy. Take your time as you move through these questions. They can bear significant fruit.
When you discover that forgiveness is a choice you can make at any moment and that it requires only a willingness to change your story, you (re)claim the power of your heart. This opens the door to possibilities for intimacy and personal growth you may not have known were there. Equipped with this knowledge, you can see through your myths and take this wisdom into the world as you consider your public persona.