
According to Lennon and McCartney, “love is all we need. It’s easy.” And love is everywhere around us all the time, in our songs and in films and books. Apart from the weather, it’s our favourite topic of conversation. Who’s together, who wants to get together, who’s no longer together… There’s so much love around you’d think we’d all be experts on the subject, wouldn’t you?
But no, love is still a mystery to most of us and still causes us untold fascination and, literally, heartache. Could it be that we’re not thinking about it the right way? Or is that actually the problem – when we get caught up in love, we just stop thinking?
Thought and emotion are indeed separate expressions of the mind with different biochemical processes involved. Yet that doesn’t mean they can’t work together. Our feelings certainly influence how we think about some things. Say someone close to us gets into trouble with the law: the options we consider might be very different to those about a stranger. Equally, the way we think about someone can change depending on how they make us feel.
However much time we spend together, however many shared experiences, we can never really know another person completely. All our relationships are a complicated whirlpool of thoughts and feelings.
How often do we hear someone, who was once in a loving relationship that has broken down, say that they now “hate” their previous partner? Or declare to anyone who will listen that the relationship was “always toxic”? When our feelings are badly hurt, we retreat into victim mode and focus on this or that fault. There’s a blame and shame culture, which lawyers make a very good living from.
Can love really turn to hate? Are they two sides of the same coin, that we can so easily flip between? Surely not. Surely the truth is that the relationship was not founded on love in the first place, for genuine love must be undying, unconditional and immutable. And such love is not at all easy.
For all humanity’s extraordinary achievements, our relatively comfortable lives and our expanding consciousness, human beings still live with many fears and insecurities. Life can be fragile. And, of course, there are still very many for whom basic life is definitely not secure, a struggle of poverty and poor housing, for whom expanding consciousness is a foreign language. Such people, more than most, need love in their lives.
This is the key to the subject, isn’t it, that we all in our different ways need to feel secure and cared for.
Most human partnerships begin with a special attraction. It may be physical. We like how someone looks, their body shape and how they move, their smile, their eyes. Then high levels of dopamine and norepinephrine are released, making us energetic and euphoric, even leading to insomnia. We are ‘in love’. On the other hand, it can be a meeting of minds, an attraction to how someone speaks, their thoughts and interests.
Then, with time and shared experiences, we grow closer to the other person and learn more about them. We learn how they make us feel and think: if they allay our fears and make us feel safe, then could be a lasting partnership that will fulfil our needs…
Have you spotted the flaw in all this, the crack in the very foundations of the relationship? It’s “they”.
All too often, our thoughts and feelings depend on someone else. From the very outset, many relationships are dependent, conditional on how the other person behaves towards us. But people change. Our bodies change, our interests change, our needs change. People develop illnesses or disabilities. Experiences that were once exciting become irrelevant. We run into financial difficulties or work stresses. Our beliefs about the world or even our religious faith can change.
And so relationships break down because “She just changed” or “I was changing but he was stuck in the past.”
Now, this is not to say that just because a relationship doesn’t last there was no love there to begin with. There is no natural law saying that human relationships must be unbreakable. The wonderful marriage that lasts for half a century or more is very rare. The UK divorce rate is over 40% , and much higher in China and Russia.
Our expectations of partnerships are very different to those of a few generations ago. So let’s just accept that in a changing world it’s likely that most of us will drift apart and move in new directions, into new relationships. That doesn’t have to mean that we regret the past, or that we should criticise or hate or blame the one we’ve shared our lives with.
So we arrive at the real question. Is there such a thing as perfect love? Is there a state of knowing love that does not depend on someone else, that is unconditional and never changes whatever happens?
Throughout history, we have told and retold stories of this ideal. There was Romeo and Juliet, of course, although that didn’t end well. And was fictional. There was Paris, Prince of Troy, and the beautiful Helen. Oh no, that caused a war. And is a myth. Antony and Cleopatra were real people, but that ended with a poisonous asp. This is not looking good.
There are a few better candidates, though. Abigail Smith and John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers of the USA, were a truly devoted couple who wrote more than a thousand letters to each other even while they were married. She wrote, “There is a tye more binding than Humanity, and stronger than Friendship…” The Romantic poets Percy and Mary Shelley also give us hope. “Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips,” he wrote.
There are clues here to what we are looking for. These partnerships were not founded on physical attraction, behaviour or interests, power or personal needs, but in the deepest sense – a meeting of souls.
Read part two of Nigel's article at https://www.spiritrevelations.com/lets-talk-about-love/.
Read more articles by Nigel Peace.