Meditation

Surrender to Love

Not to a person. To the thing I have been defending against

Orion Quin · 14 min read

I love being with a woman I care about. I love the closeness. And somewhere in the middle of it, a part of me begins counting the hours until I can go home. I do not stay the night, and almost never a second night, until I feel safe. Nobody has ever done anything to cause it. It is a pattern of mine. I have told myself it is the space I need to enter commitment gradually, and I think that is true. I also wonder whether part of it is the same dose-managing in a different costume: I want her very much, and I want my own door to leave by. Both can be true. The second is not a verdict on the first.

That is the small, private version of what this essay is about.

When I say surrender to love, people hear one of two things. Some hear a love song, the swooning kind where you give yourself up to someone and the rest is weather. Others hear a warning, because they have watched a friend give up everything for a person who did not deserve it.

Neither is what I mean. I have been turning the phrase over for a while, and the more I look at it, the less it has to do with another person at all.

Here is where I have landed. Surrender to love is not surrendering to someone. It is surrendering resistance: the whole quiet apparatus I have built to make sure love cannot reach me unmanaged.

What I do not mean

I do not mean submission. Submission hands your agency to someone else. That is a different thing, and it usually ends badly.

I do not mean abandoning judgment. Longing does not get a vote on whether I stay in a room where I am not met with honesty and respect. The rule I keep coming back to everywhere else applies here too: keep the signal, decline the instruction. Love is a signal like any other, and a very loud one. I can feel all of it and still decide what to do.

And I do not mean making someone responsible for my happiness. That is not surrender. That is a handoff, and it tends to end the same way.

What I do mean

The intellect has felt safer than the heart. I want them on even footing.

I can explain attachment. I can name the avoidance, the fear, the longing, and tell you which part of the brain is probably involved. None of that is the same as standing in front of another human being with the armor off. Understanding can turn into a very sophisticated way of staying out of the room. I know, because I have used it that way.

So when I say surrender, I mean the moment understanding stops substituting for participation. I stop analyzing the water and get in.

My defenses are not exotic. I go quiet. I say “okay” calmly when I am anything but. I keep back the things I am afraid will disappoint. Each one is a small act of control: I am deciding in advance how much of this can touch me. Surrender is putting down that control, and only that. Not my judgment, not my boundaries, not my sense of who I am. Just the insistence that I get to manage the dose, that I must decide in advance how deeply another person is allowed to reach me.

The word has a history

I did not coin this, and the word turns out to be older and stranger than I assumed.

Islam. The Arabic islam comes from a root, s-l-m, that carries submission but also peace, safety and wholeness.¹¹ I would not lean on etymology to settle a theological argument. What I take from it is smaller: in at least one great tradition, the word for yielding is cousin to the word for being whole.

The Gita. Near its end, in verse 18.66, Krishna tells Arjuna to abandon his other supports, take refuge in him alone, and not be afraid.⁴ That surrender is addressed to the divine, not a lover, and I am borrowing the posture, not the theology: put down the scaffolding, go toward the thing, do not fear.

Christianity. Theologians call it kenosis, from the Greek verb in Philippians 2:7, usually translated that he “emptied himself.”⁷ Eckhart’s word was Gelassenheit, glossed in one essay on him as “releasement” or “letting go.”⁸ Power set down on purpose, and a letting go of the grasping, not of the world.

Taoism. Chapter 78 of the Tao Te Ching says nothing is softer or weaker than water, and that nothing can overcome it. In one translation: “The weak overcome the strong. The soft conquers the hard.”¹⁰ Water does not win by pushing. It wins by not being what can be broken.

These traditions do not agree on the metaphysics, and I do not need them to. What interests me is the possibility they illuminate from different directions: that some forms of strength come not from tightening our grip but from releasing it.

The dissenting voices

It would be dishonest to quote only the traditions that agree with me. Two of them push back, and I think they are right to.

The Stoics are the obvious dissent. Epictetus, in Elizabeth Carter’s old translation, advises that if you kiss your child or your wife you should say to yourself that you only kiss things which are human, and then you will not be disturbed if either of them dies.⁵ A little later he adds: don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.⁵ Read one way, the first line is a technique for loving with one hand held back, a pre-payment against grief. Stoic readers would say that is too narrow: Epictetus is not asking for less love, only a clear view of what we do not control, and loving someone while remembering that their presence is not ours to command. I think that is the better reading. I still know what the colder version feels like from the inside, because it feels like safety. It has cost me.

The Buddhist tradition pushes in a different direction, and it is the one I most needed. The Visuddhimagga, in the Ñāṇamoli selection I read, says that when loving-kindness fails “it degenerates into selfish affectionate desire.”³ That is the warning against the opposite error. Surrender is not clinging. It is not I will love you so hard you cannot leave. A love that grips is another form of resistance, only wearing warmer clothes.

The Song of Songs, for its part, will not let love be tidy. “Love is strong as death,” says the King James translation, and “many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.”⁹ Whatever else you make of that, it is not describing something you can manage.

What the research says (and does not)

I trained in exercise physiology, not psychology, and I read these as an interested outsider. I have read only the abstract of the first paper below and the relevant findings of the second, not both in full, so treat my account as a pointer, not a verdict. I mark my confidence the way I do in my Inquiries. Promising means a real result, but one that fits the idea without proving it. My reading means I am the one doing the connecting.

Promising: the dependency paradox. Brooke Feeney, in a 2007 paper, argued and tested the idea that accepting a partner’s dependence on you, and being able to depend on them, promotes independence instead of eroding it. Across two studies, including an experiment and a six-month follow-up of couples, people whose partners accepted their need for support were more autonomous and better at pursuing their own goals.¹ It is a study of couples, not a theory of love, and I would not stretch it. But it runs against the instinct I carried for years, that needing someone is how you lose yourself.

Promising: the cost of holding it in. James Gross and Oliver John, in 2003, looked at two ways people manage emotion. One is reappraisal, changing how you think about a situation. The other is suppression, hiding what you feel. People who habitually suppressed shared less of what they felt, reported more avoidance of closeness and less social support, and were rated by peers as having less close relationships.² That is a correlation, much of it from questionnaires, and the authors themselves note it cannot establish cause, so it cannot tell us which way the arrow points. Still, my own pattern of the calm “okay” reads differently after seeing it.

My reading. Neither study says that surrender is the answer. What they suggest, together, is that the safety I got from guarding myself may have been bought at a price I was not counting: closeness I did not feel, support I did not use. I would not build a philosophy on two studies. I will let them nudge me.

Two solitudes

Rilke is the one who finally let me hold all this together. In his seventh letter to the young poet, written from Rome in May 1904, he says love consists in two solitudes that “protect and border and greet each other,” and that it is “a high inducement for the individual to ripen.”⁶ The wording I quote is the one on the text page I found, which does not name its translator.

That is surrender without dissolving. The two people stay two. Nobody is swallowed. The borders are still there, and they are the very thing that makes the greeting mean something. In this picture, surrender is not the erasing of the boundary. It is being willing to go to the boundary and say hello.

Strength, not defeat

We associate surrender with losing. I think this kind takes more than resistance does.

It is easier to withdraw than to stay emotionally available. Easier to explain pain than to feel it. Easier to say you no longer care than to admit that you do. Armor is not always cowardice. Sometimes it is the intelligence of a person who learned that openness carries a cost. But the armor keeps working long after we have forgotten what we were defending against, and by then it may be keeping out the very thing we most want to let in.

There is a line I once put in a dating profile, the one from Leonard Cohen about the crack in everything. I have since come to think it says more than I first heard in it: that what is broken is also where something gets through. I would put it my own way. A crack lets the light out as well as in, and I am no longer so sure that a heart without any is the better design.

I have also had the experience that a heart can be broken and rebuilt more loving and stronger than it was. How lucky am I to be able to love so deeply that it can happen. That is not an argument for being hurt. The pain was real, and I would not choose it for its own sake. But the tragedy would not be that I loved and suffered. It would be that I became so afraid of suffering that I stopped allowing myself to love.

Surrender is not staying

Here is the part that keeps this from turning into mush.

Surrendering to love does not require remaining in a relationship that cannot meet you with honesty, respect or reciprocity. You can surrender to the reality of your own love while accepting the reality of someone else’s choices. You can stop fighting what you feel without fighting for what cannot be.

I have been there recently. When someone I cared about ended things in a message I did not think was fair, I did not reply. I could disagree with what had been said and still accept that it was over, and I could wish them well without needing them to see it my way. I did not have to deny what I felt, and I did not have to act on it. That, to me, is closer to what surrender looks like in practice than any grand gesture.

Love without possession is part of this too. Surrender includes giving up the insistence that love has to take a particular form, arrive from a particular person, or deliver a particular outcome. I can recognize it as something I take part in and cultivate. It does not have to be handed to me by anyone.

Love is where the philosophy gets expensive

I have spent years arguing that spiritual growth is not escape from our humanity. I do not want a state in which I no longer feel jealousy, grief, fear or longing. I want the freedom to feel them without becoming their prisoner.

Love is where that gets tested hardest, because love exposes exactly what I cannot control. I cannot guarantee that anyone will stay, or understand me, or love me back. And I can still choose to love. Freedom, in this view, is not the absence of vulnerability. It is the ability to stay conscious and intentional while vulnerable.

The question I cannot skip

I have been writing as though the hard part were giving love. For me, I suspect it is not. Giving has felt more natural. When I give, I can offer something of myself while still deciding how much to reveal. I can be generous, attentive, even deeply loving, and remain partly protected. Receiving is different. Receiving asks me to stand still while someone else reaches toward the parts of me I have learned to keep guarded.

The harder question is whether I can receive it. Whether I can let someone love me without going quiet, without managing the dose, without translating it into something I can analyze. Whether my willingness to be loved matches my capacity to love.

I do not have an answer, so here are the questions I find myself circling instead.

Does being loved feel like owing? Giving puts me in the position of the one who has something to offer. Receiving puts me in the position of the one who now has a debt, and I am not sure I like how quickly that feeling arrives.

Does it mean trusting someone else’s judgment? To accept that you love me, I have to accept that you have seen me clearly and chosen anyway. That means believing your eyes over my own opinion of myself, which is a strange thing to ask of a man who has spent years being his own most careful reader.

And does it expose needs I would rather not have? Being loved well shows me exactly how much I wanted it. The calm “okay” is very good at pretending I wanted nothing.

There is something almost absurd about it. I have spent years trying to understand love, writing about it, asking what it means to love without possession or condition. And I am left with a question that no amount of reading can answer for me: when love is freely offered, can I simply let it in?

I do not know which of these is true for me, or whether it is all three, or something else. I would rather leave that open than hand you a tidy answer. But I notice that asking the question out loud already feels like something slightly lowering its guard.

So what do we do with it?

A few questions I ask myself, which you are welcome to borrow:

I am not good at all of these. Some days I am good at none of them. The point is not to be fearless. It is to be a little less defended than I was yesterday.