Some thoughts on love

I've been spending a fair amount of my recent spare time pondering love--what it is, the experience of it and what the "state of love" address might sound like if we were at all serious about its place in the human experience. There are a number of routes of conservation to consider in this topic, but one that I return to in perpetuity is the many ways fear comes hand-in-hand with love or at least the possibility of it.

We fear rejection of unrequited affections. We fear the withdrawal or abandonment that we risk when accepting love offered by others. Love makes us want to expose the parts of ourselves that we fear others may abuse, reject or find incomprehensible.

It is, in many ways, a smart thing to resist. If you've got a reasonably strong defensive drive, keeping love out makes good sense. This doesn't mean being an outright asshole or a hermit, but it can cut a great many things out of our lives because we don't want to accept the risks, hard work and even directly negative aspects of being love.

All of these fears connect to a lack of trust in ourselves. If you feel reasonably secure in your sense of self, it may still hurt when others reject you or your ideas--but you don't see it as the final judgement of who you are. Relationships which involve love, however, are occasions where we can dig down to those deepest parts of ourselves, including the never totally excised vulnerabilities that are intrinsic to our human state.

Such relationships are opportunities to know ourselves and others in ways that we cannot do on our own or "out-of-love" members of a relationship. Being alone and having relationships that don't include love are certainly good in their own ways. I think, however, it is easy to lull ourselves into a sense of security by avoiding love. The real truth is those deepest insecurities reside with us whether or not we open ourselves up to the opportunities to know others in a loving way where we can acknowledge our fears.

If a whole life is spent without taking the risk of love, it is also spent without the connections that can help us find some kind of acceptance of the fragility of being human.

Here's just a short clip of one of the many thinkers whose ideas are helping me ponder love these days: