To Love and Be Loved

“If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love” -Tolstoy

In reading the words of Carl Jung about love, I found myself fascinated with his ideas of projection.  The idea behind projection, according to Jung, is that we project how we see and love people onto them.  It’s an idea related to “romance addiction”–being in love with love, and not in love with a person.  He discusses the idea in such a way that made me wonder, do I love people for who they are, or do I love them for how I want to them to be?  This made me think about my relationships with people and the different kinds of love that I might “feel” and “project” onto them.

Robert A. Johnson quotes Jung, and add his own ideas about love saying,

“Feeling is a matter of 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 upheavals are at rest, the soft word of understanding, the daily companionship, the encouragement offered in a difficult moment, the small fight when least expected, the spontaneous gesture of love.”

Both Jung and Johnson’s ideas of love are about shared experiences. I love that! They indicate moments in time where your heart interacts with another heart. I like to call these moments “heart pictures”–small moments in time where your heart takes a picture. Life is a conglomeration of these heart pictures, gathered together to create a whole. This is the idea we call love.

I am amazed at how much of me is made up of all the people who have influenced my life. I am made of them, and they in turn have a piece of me.  My life has certainly been changed by my interactions with people. I strive to meet new people, learn from them, love them, let them love me, and come away with a sense of becoming whole.

Johnson wrote a book about myths and the ideology of western “romantic love.”  In this book, he talks about how love is based on commitment and service. In other words, love is not selfish or something to take, but is something to be given.  He said,

“We can learn that human relationship is inseparable from friendship and commitment.  We can learn the essence of love is not to use the other person 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.”

Johnson’s idea of love might be cliché. “It is better to love than be loved,” he says. The idea that “true” love comes from serving and loving others is nothing new. Many of you have experienced this selfless kind of love–either by giving it or in receiving it. And while I believe strongly in serving and loving others, it is nearly impossible to do so effectively without loving yourself. Once you learn to love yourself, you can truly love others freely.  One of My favorite poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, said,

“Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate-?); it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself in another’s sake.”

To add to this, Enrich Fromm also said,

“Love is union with somebody or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self.”

I think this idea of two whole people uniting or coming together in love–not merely one completing the other–and adding upon their love for each other is beautiful. There is a power that flows into your life when you love yourself first, then others.

But what about the loss of love or the pain love causes? What about the wounded hearts, the lonely nights, the struggle to allow oneself to love again?  What about those who break hearts, those who leave us broken-hearted, and all those whose hearts we never seem to be able to reach?

Rabbi David Wolpe in his book, Making Loss Matter, said this about love,

“Love is an ever fixed mark in the minds of poets, but in the world, love can fade or end. ‘Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,’ wrote Shakespeare, ‘but bears it out even to the edge of doom.’ We want to believe it. But for those who have lost love, the heroic words about everlastingness are mocked by the pain of unhealed hearts…The inescapable paradox of love is this: It is made precious by time, which threatens to destroy it. Only through loss can we love, but it is loss that wracks our heart… True love is the outgrowth of the ability to have faith… To love is to accept the possibility of suffering… The root of love is bound up with a knowledge of pain and a consciousness of loss.  In the end, such love connects us to God.”

All who love know there is a measure of pain that accompanies it. Sometimes I think it’s the pain that makes you fully aware of the kind of love you have. Your tears will be counted, your sorrow will be made known, and love will find its way again into your heart.

I know that I am the person I am today because of the love I have felt, shared, and given.  My life is truly a collection of love.  Thank you for being part of that love, and most importantly for letting me love you.                      

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References

Fromm, Erich. The Art of Loving. New York: Harper & Row, Inc., 1956

Johnson, Robert A. Living from the Heart: The Process of Personal Transformation. Florida: HCI, 1999

Johnson, Robert A. We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love. New York: Harpers Collins Publishers, 1983

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters To A Young Poet. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc.,1954

Wolpe, David. Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group, 1999