I’ve written about love more than almost anything else. Quiet love and loud, disruptive love. Heartbreak. What it takes for two people to stay together. The love I have for my sons and for my dogs. On my more reckless days I’ve even argued that love might be what we mean when we say God.
And I still don’t know what it is.
That isn’t modesty. It’s the plain state of things. After all those pages, love is the one subject that makes me put the pen down and stare out the window. Is it an emotion? A feeling? An energy? An action? Something more mystical than any of those? And is it something we give, or something we receive?
I don’t have research for you. No studies, no citations. What I have is a lifetime of seeking it, needing it, not feeling it, and having it around me all the time. Sometimes that was all four in the same year. It’s the only evidence I’ve got, so I’ll lay it out and you can weigh it against your own.
Is it a feeling?
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds.
Sometimes. I know the lift in the chest, the warmth, the ache. But here’s what wrecked that answer for me. There were long stretches when love was around me, plainly offered, and I couldn’t feel it. The love was there. My feeling of it wasn’t. If love can be present without being felt, the feeling can’t be the whole thing.
Shakespeare knew it. A feeling alters constantly. If love were only a feeling, it would be gone by Tuesday.
Is it an action?
Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not.
The old texts keep saying so. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians doesn’t describe a feeling at all. It describes behavior, a whole list of things you do. Erich Fromm said the same thing in modern terms, calling love “an activity, not a passive affect.” Of every answer I’ve tried, this is the one I trust most when I look at relationships that work. The ones that last aren’t the ones with the biggest feelings. They’re the ones where two people keep doing the unglamorous thing again and again. It’s chop wood, carry water, with a person attached.
It also changes how I read my own life. If love is something you do, then the people around me were loving me long before I could feel it. I’m still absorbing that.
Is it an energy?
The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.
I can’t measure it. I can tell you a room changes when it’s there. Anyone who has walked into a house where people love each other knows it in the first ten seconds, before anyone speaks. Dogs know it better than we do. Dante believed it moves the stars. I’ll settle for rooms.
Whatever it is, it has more than one face.
The quiet kind
A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
This is the one I overlooked longest, because it makes no noise. It’s the person who shows up before dawn and never mentions it. It asks for nothing and is present anyway. Aristotle, asked what a friend is, is supposed to have answered with that line, and I can’t improve on it. Quiet love doesn’t announce itself, so it’s easy to mistake for nothing at all.
Maybe being loved isn’t the same as being needed, either. Someone can need what you bring into their life without being particularly curious about the rest of you. Quiet love seems to contain that curiosity, the desire to know the person who exists when they aren’t doing anything for you.
The dogs
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained.
My dogs are wildly inconvenient. I’ve had one or two for most of my life, and they’re a pain in the ass. They need walking when it’s raining. They eat things they shouldn’t. Somebody has to pick up the poop, and that somebody is me. And I’ve never known a truer or more durable love than the one I’ve had from them.
I think I know why. I don’t have to be anything other than what I am. I don’t have to be impressive or wise or fixed. I walk them, feed them, pet them, and clean up after them, and that’s the whole arrangement. It turns out to be everything. Their love isn’t a reward for a performance. It’s there in the morning, all of it, before I’ve done a single thing to earn it.
It’s also the plainest proof I have that love is something you do. Theirs is made of showing up. Mine is made of inconvenient, unglamorous acts. Neither of us has ever once discussed it. If there’s a more reliable spiritual practice than walking a dog twice a day, I haven’t found it.
My boys
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
I have two boys, and I love them with everything I’ve got. I won’t lie, they were a lot of work. I used to tease them about their place in the pack, just below the dog. They have a dry sense of humor too, so it came back at me, and I’m glad it did.
We’re like a lot of men in that we don’t fill our time together with words. Silence came naturally to me, and it resonated with them, so together we learned to enjoy it as a shared presence.
Both of them are secure in themselves and confident in who they are. What matters most to me is that they love well and they’re kind. I think we did okay.
Romantic love
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.
This is the big one, the one we all go searching for and have so many ideas about. Some of my most intense experiences of love didn’t have stable ground to stand on. They were exciting at the beginning and painful at the end. Some of that was the loud kind, and I don’t regret any of it. But I’d be lying if I said it was built to last.
Rumi says it plainly in the Mathnawi, in R. A. Nicholson’s translation (Book I, verse 109): “Being in love is made manifest by soreness of heart: there is no sickness like heartsickness.” Nobody who has loved at full size gets out unmarked. I’ve stopped reading the marks as evidence that something went wrong. They’re evidence that something was there.
I’ve been married twice and divorced twice. The love in each was different, unique to its time and circumstances and to who we were then. Each time the choice was a fork in the road and a leap of faith. I wonder if that’s true for most people, that nobody really knows what they’re stepping into. I suspect the ones who say they did are either lucky or editing.
Lately I’m learning to appreciate a calmer love, the accepting and enduring kind that builds deliberately and quietly and allows for a different kind of depth. It doesn’t announce itself, so it gets mistaken for a lesser love. Please don’t judge it that way. I believe it’s the love I’ve been seeking all this time. Shakespeare had it in the same sonnet: love is “an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken.” Not the tempest, but the mark that stays put while it passes.
The love I’m still learning
All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.
Loving myself is the one I’m still figuring out. I know how to love other people. I know how to give it, how to cradle it, how to hold on when everything says let go. I don’t dislike myself. I think I’m pretty okay, and I accept myself, more or less, though I suspect I’m harder on myself than the world is.
Here’s the closest I’ve come to an answer, and it isn’t grand. Self-love may be nothing more than sitting with myself and not turning away from what’s uncomfortable. No affirmations, no mirror work, nothing loud. Just quiet presence. It’s what I try to offer anyone else who is hurting: someone who stays, who isn’t frightened, who doesn’t hurry them toward feeling better. The harder part is offering it to the five-year-old inside me when he shows up. I don’t fix him or explain him or tell him to toughen up. I sit there and let him cry.
Pascal thought most of our unhappiness comes from being unable to stay quietly in our own room. I’ve come to think the room is me.
For other people it may be something bigger. I like the simplicity. It doesn’t ask me to feel any particular way. It asks me to stay, and staying is something I know how to do. Holding on when everything says let go turns out to be most of it, pointed the other way.
Giving or receiving?
It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.
Where does love actually live? In the giving, or in the receiving?
Most of the old advice leans toward giving, and I took it to heart. I’m far better at giving than at receiving. Trusting love enough to take it in, openly, without doing something in return, is harder for me.
But Gibran, in the same chapter, says something that stopped me: “And to the open-handed the search for one who shall receive is joy greater than giving.” Even the most generous giver, he’s saying, finds their greatest joy in someone willing to receive. Love that only flows one way isn’t a circuit. It’s a service. And service can be a way of staying safe. If I’m the one giving, I set the terms and I know my role. Receiving asks me to be the person being cared for, with nothing to offer except being there.
Here’s what I’m starting to see. Every gift needs someone willing to take it. When I brush off a kindness, I’m not being humble. I’m turning down the other person’s gift. Receiving is an action too. It means not deflecting the compliment, not rushing to even the score, not explaining why I don’t deserve it. It means saying thank you and letting it land.
I’m practicing with the smallest person in the room first, the five-year-old I sit with. He isn’t asking me to fix anything. I suspect he’s asking to be received, and that it’s the same skill I need for everyone else. The dogs showed me it can be done. I take their love every morning without earning it.
Maybe that’s why I wonder about the years when love was all around me and I couldn’t feel it. Maybe it was arriving the whole time, and I wasn’t taking delivery.
So I’ll ask you what I keep asking myself. Which are you better at, giving or receiving? And when someone loves you, do you take it in, or hand it straight back?
Is it what we call God?
He is a great spirit (daimon), and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal.
This is the oldest claim of all. “God is love,” says the First Letter of John, and then it says that whoever lives in love lives in God. Diotima, in Plato, is more careful. She tells Socrates that love isn’t a god at all but a great spirit, the go-between that carries messages across the gap. I like that better than my own big claims.
The lover’s ailment is separate from all other ailments: love is the astrolabe of the mysteries of God.
Whether love be from this (earthly) side or from that (heavenly) side, in the end it leads us yonder.
Rumi comes at it differently again. He doesn’t call love the god or the go-between. He calls it an instrument, and an astrolabe is something you navigate by, not somewhere you arrive. Whichever side it starts from, he says, it leads the same way.
I can’t prove any of it, and neither could they. It’s the hypothesis I keep coming back to, because it fits the paradox I started with. It’s something that can be present while unfelt, that works through people, that fills a room, and that outlasts every mood. That sounds less like an emotion and more like a place we live in without noticing. I hold it loosely. When a word gets big enough to mean everything, I get suspicious of it, and I suspect that’s healthy.
So what is it?
But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
I don’t know. I’ve been curious about it my whole life, and I intend to stay curious, and to keep practicing, for the rest of my days. The more I learn, the more questions I have, and I’ve decided that’s fine.
Here’s what I do know. It shows up more when I name it, and it grows when I act on it. So I’m trying to say it out loud. To do the small, unglamorous thing for someone who matters. When someone does something loving for me, I’m trying not to deflect it, to say thank you and let it land. To sit with myself for a few minutes without fixing anything, the way I’d sit with someone I love. And to look around once in a while and notice where love already was.
I hope that when my time is done, people can say he loved with the best of them.