The hidden vector of love?

We reach out for love like a baby crabbing a toy, we are attracted to shiny, new things, excitement and adventure. Love is part of a grand story, a vital ingredient of life and every prince needs to be pursuing it exclusively otherwise they end up wistful and redundant, an ending before the beginning. It is that belief that love is part of the reward for searching, it is at the end of the rainbow, that makes loves lack seem so tragic, a personal failure and the answers is always hard work and persistence, you have not tried, you do not deserve it, the lack reflects your own lacking. Good things come to those who wait, you serve your time, grow up and into a swan, as you are so clearly an ugly duckling now, that is the promise that so many of us find reasonable, it makes sense but it is fundamentally wrong.

By looking outside of ourselves, we can only see the end results that we desire, we see the happy couple with babies, elegant men with golden rings attached, blushing brides and we know we want that because of the promise that this is what happiness looks like, this is something worth achieving. Lacking that is failure, and we know this because we tell ourselves that this is the truth, we look, we compare, never mind that is always looks better in the films, at a distance, than when we witness it up close. Every couple when you know them well, have their troubles, they are tired and as grumpy as everyone else, they have problem, different problems but they are still present, there is no magic, and yet for some reason the lie that love makes you happy exists. Even the couple think it's true, they just have to work harder, outlast the problems and that perfect love will emerge.

Part of the problem is that we have so few words for love, the Greeks had eight, unconditional, romantic, affectionate, self, familiar(paternal), enduring, playful and obsessive, which at least gives us a map to start talking about the landscape that is love. So many of us seek self-love from romantic love which itself is a temporary state of being, marriages are made up of mix of it and enduring love, which is what remains when romance has left the building, it is the bridge between us that is built during our desiring and heat of closeness. Affectionate love is probably the most abundant in our lives, we can have many friends, family that we actually enjoy the company of (not impossible, however unlikely) and even colleagues, bosses and teachers that we respect, it is a large bubble and can protect us from the worst of the world.

However it is self-love that in many way the most important, it is the gateway to the other kinds of love and allows us to appreciate and enjoy being present with the others. If you do not love yourself, how can it be conceivable that anyone could love you, it seems obvious to say and yet that is not how most people act in their own lives, they need someone else to love them before they believe they have permission to love themselves. It only seems crazy and self-defeating when you look at it from the outside, it is not the story that we are told, the prince has do deeds to get his prize of love, to be deserving and worthy of such love, it is not just given away, it is a rare diamond that is why it is valuable.

And I agree with that part of the story, self-love is valuable, priceless and it is not easy, but you do not look for it at the end of the journey, it is where you start and where you need to have the courage to go back to. The kind of courage that allows you admit that you are wrong, that other people have knowledge that you do not, that every action you have taken so far has been incorrect, you have to return to the beginning of your story, you have to stop looking outside of you for that kind of love, you have to stop confusing it with the other types of love, they are the next step not where you start. If you think, well of course I love myself, just say, “I am loved” out loud three times, and find out how hard it is. Then imagine being able to say it as if you were stating that this is an apple, without pride, causally as if it were the most natural and ordinary thing in the world, imagine being able to say it to a friend or stranger as if it were normal and average, an unremarkable fact of being human, that it was the default state of being.

As impossible as this might seem, it turns out that when you drop your expectations, beliefs and regrets, when you stop comparing and judging others and yourself against whatever ridiculous standards of a perfect person, and you stop pursuing love like a prize, a status symbol of a successful live, what is left is self-love. It was inside you, it was the hidden vector that you had been missing from your calculation, because when you sit with yourself without all these thoughts that tangle you up in their web, you are left with a feeling of being loved. There is no cost to this love, it is just there, almost in the background except it is the light with which you see the world, invisible and yet illuminating, when you stop trying to look into the sun and you notice it by it's effect on you and the world around you.

It is in dropping the “I am” from “I am loved” that we find our presence with love, it may look and feel like a state of grace, easy and joy, however underneath that is love, as life and our motives and actions can only come from the two basic states of love and fear, they all trace back to these two building blocks. The love that satisfies us can only come from our selves as it is the only source of love that is not dependent on others, on circumstances and luck, it does not need to be earnt, it is inherent and enduring no matter what you do, it is not conditional or dependent on good behaviour. It is the love you desire without action, it is present no matter what and it is the only foundation upon which to build your life, and once you find that hidden depth you can build any castle you want on it which is the kind of fairy tale I want to live.