D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February 2010
It Takes Courage to Love
An essay in honor of St. Valentine, valiant, valorous martyr.
By Diana S. Edwards
Each of us yearns for deep and lasting love, for union that eases the loneliness of our solitude. We want to play, to laugh, to hold one another and enjoy the intimacy of mind, body and spirit that can come from loving another. Yet love is often ephemeral, out of reach, painful rather than pleasurable, isolating rather than intimate. Disappointment in love can throw us into despair. How can we find and nurture the love that can help us develop the best in ourselves and in the ones we love?
In a translation of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, aptly entitled Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties, the challenge is set before us: "For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."
In these letters on love, Rilke explains that young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love. They "err so often and so grievously in this," because they have no clarity about themselves, and when possessed by love, can only "fling themselves at each other in all their untidiness, confusion and disorder."
What then, are we to do? The drive towards union, the drive to procreation, the desires of our senses do not let us rest and attain the clarity and wisdom needed to truly love one another. We are never so alive as when we are in love, and so we stumble along, hoping to find and hold the magic of love in spite of our failures. From youth to old age, love in all its variations, compels our attention and our energy.
As a teenager, hormones blazing, hearts quivering, we ask ourselves (and our elders): Is this love? How do I know if this girl, this boy, is the one for me? And later, how do I know if this is the right one to marry, the right one to have children with? Perhaps your trusted older confidantes gave you a knowing smile and the frustratingly unhelpful answer, "You will know when it is really love, you will know when it is time." And we don't know. One divorce and two children later, we realize either that it wasn't time, or it wasn't love. Perhaps a more helpful answer would have been, "You don't marry someone you can live with; you marry someone you can't live without!"
We stumble valiantly on, always yearning, always hoping. And, with any luck, we gain clarity about ourselves and learn to have compassion for those human failings that stubbornly trail along with us and our ideals. By now, we have hurt someone whom we intended only to love. By now, we have learned that sometimes the person we think we love brings out the worst in us — we become a person we don't like or respect. In trying to love another and please the loved one, we may have become the worst we can be, not the best. (That relationship needs to end.)
By midlife, we may have hit the wall. "Why do I keep getting into abusive relationships?" "Why did I end up in the same kind of marriage as my parents? I was determined that I would do everything differently." "Why do I hear that same critical tone in my voice that I used to hear in my mother's voice?" "Why did I marry a man whose unpredictable rages mirror the anger I experienced with my father? I don't want to live with that kind of tension and anxiety." A glimmering of insight begins to take hold: We recreate the patterns and the atmosphere that we learned from early childhood. No matter how much we wanted our lives to be better than our parents', and our relationships to be stronger and more satisfying, we have come up short. The pattern, the template, for relationships that was formed in the first months and years of life continues into adulthood and affects every subsequent relationship.
What questions should we ask? What do we need to know to become aware of the patterns and to begin to change them? What was life like for my parents when I was born? What did they teach me about love?
Perhaps your mother was depressed when you were a baby. She did not respond to your cries and coos and gurgles. She did not smile and sing to you or even think to change your diaper or dress you warmly when the house was cold. She was unresponsive and sad. What response could you have had to that emotional environment? What sense of yourself and your value would come from having a parent who was emotionally unavailable?
Perhaps your father (or mother) was alcoholic, or addicted to other drugs — and unpredictable: angry and hostile one moment, placating and apologetic the next. You learn to be always alert and watchful to anticipate the moods of the person you needed for survival. Your own emotions were not validated. You tried to be whatever you needed to be to get what you needed. Learning to identify and handle your own emotions was irrelevant; the challenge was to learn to identify and handle the emotions and behavior of the adults. As an adult the hardest questions for you to answer may well be, "How do you feel?" "What do you want?" You lost touch with that in childhood.
Perhaps the mother (or father) who fell in love with you at birth, the one who loved you intensely and unconditionally — the one who taught you to love in return — died young. You learned too early that love is inextricably bound with loss — and you never want to feel that pain again. You grieve in ways that others may not recognize. You close off.
Perhaps you were exposed to severe abuse or neglect as a young child. The parents you depended on for physical and emotional survival are the ones who hurt you and terrify you. You have no safe place and no safe person to rely on. The world is dangerous and so is love. Perhaps you learn to hate, or to hide.
Under these conditions, an infant, toddler or child cannot master basic developmental stages: trust, empathy, reciprocity, the security to explore and to balance dependence with independence. Instead, you learn that you cannot trust, you learn fear of abandonment, or you learn that withdrawal is the safest path. Maybe the only way you could get attention and get some of your needs met was to throw tantrums. As an adult, you throw rages.
Perhaps you were taught that reason is everything, that you must always temper your emotions and subject your actions to the objective realm of reason. But passion is not of that realm, so you struggle to maintain control. You turn away from the person who incites that dangerous passion within you. Passion rocks the foundation of your belief system. You are afraid.
Maybe you think that in loving another you will lose your self, that in the merging and uniting of sensual and spiritual selves, you, the individual, will no longer exist. Love will take away your soul.
There are many circumstances, many heartbreaks, from infancy onwards,
that can make us afraid to love. Fear is the greatest impediment to love. Fear
of failure, fear of more loss, fear of losing ourselves if we follow our passion.
Fear. That is why I say that it takes courage to love. Courage, clarity, compassion — and,
yes, commitment. This is not the commitment of "until death do us part," but
the commitment to find our own truths, the commitment to nurture the seed of
self into its most glorious flowering. We cannot be true to another if we are
not first true to ourselves.
If we don't dare to love, we cannot live fully. To quote Rilke again, "To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself." How else, but through a balance of solitude and relationship, can we develop into the person we are meant to be? How, except with love, can we guard and nurture the development of others? What else but love can bring such joy and such pleasure?
Love opens you to a bigger world. A person who wants to close you off, isolate you, to imprison you literally or physically, is showing fear and a need for power and control, not love. Love opens your heart, your eyes, your ears; love opens your senses and enlarges your spirit. You feel generous and kind. You feel strong. The light sparkles through the trees when you walk hand in hand; the bluebirds dart and dive and invite you to play. Being close to the loved one makes you feel as if your molecules are vibrating, your cells are dancing with one another, your heart is singing. You smile just to see your loved one walk up the steps to the door. The tenor of his voice, the softness of her skin, the scent of arousal — all bring you to the feeling that this is where I belong. Now I am home. Home is wherever the loved one is. Love is honesty and truthfulness; love is being able to speak freely your truest thoughts and emotions. Love is having clarity about who you are and what you bring to the relationship. Love is compassion — respect for your weaknesses as well as your strengths.
To turn away from the possibility of this kind of love is to thumb your nose at the universe for such a wondrous gift. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard loved a young woman from the first that they met in 1837. He proposed marriage to her in 1840. And then, for reasons that are not clear, he broke off the engagement. The deep love they felt for each other was thrown away. This loss profoundly affected his life and work; he died at age 43. "To cheat oneself out of love," he learned, "is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity."
Have courage.
Diana S. Edwards is a licensed professional clinical counselor (LPCC) now in private practice, and a cultural anthropologist who teaches at Western New Mexico University.