At the risk of being seen as hopelessly clichéd, I decided to write about love for my February column. With the inevitable onslaught of media attention on the commercial ways our culture defines and celebrates love, I felt a certain responsibility to offer a different view, one that doesn’t romanticize romance (lovely as it can be).

I think, for the most part, we’re terribly confused about love. We often equate it with a certain kind of feeling that is reflected through attraction, affection and acts of caring, bravery or even wild abandon. Love has been described as a force that sweeps reason to the side and calls us to do things we might never consider in our seemingly saner moments. And that’s the particular aspect of our cultural beliefs about love that I want to challenge: the belief that love is somehow separate from reason.

First, let me share what I’ve come to know and understand about love. As many great spiritual teachers have said, simply and elegantly, love is who we are. It is not something we need to seek; it is the very essence of our being. We can never lose it, because we can never be apart from it. It is a powerful force, to be sure: the very force that creates and animates our universe. It is neither a thing nor an action, yet all things and actions that we recognize as harmonious, whole and life-giving arise from it. Love simply is, and it is always and already within us; yet our failure to recognize and connect with that truth gives rise to what we experience as a lack of love. And as we seek to fill this imaginary lack, we sometimes do things that seem – and in fact are – irrational.

Which brings us back to the often-held view that love is separate from reason. This view is clearly reflected in the conflict many people have felt between their “head” and their “heart.” What I’ve come to understand is that, during those times of conflict, what we’re calling the “heart” often has nothing whatsoever to do with true love. The love we feel in this “heart” is actually the yearning we feel for love, a yearning we can only have if we believe we are separate from love. That yearning can turn quickly into neediness – we need to reconnect with love because it’s painful to feel separated from it, but because we’re separated from it we don’t feel lovable; and so the yearning morphs into a need for someone outside of ourselves to prove that we are.

This is where it gets interesting. Thanks to the energetic and interconnected nature of our universe, we’re each vibrating on a mix of frequencies that reflects our beliefs, thoughts and feelings; we’re sending out signals all the time. And because like frequencies attract one another, the signals we send attract people to us who are on similar frequencies. (This is highly oversimplified, of course, but still valid.) So if I’m harboring the belief that I am not lovable, I am likely to attract someone who is not capable of loving and respecting me.

I’ve seen this play out in real life time and again. Over the years I’ve worked with many women as they’ve grappled with the decision to continue or end a particular romantic relationship. It’s uncanny how closely their experiences match – not in specific details, but in the patterns and underlying assumptions.

This is how it looks: the woman is involved with a man who exhibits some troubling behavior. Not a simple difference in preference, such as one person’s desire for the toilet seat to be down while the other really couldn’t care less, but something that reflects a basic lack of respect for his partner or the relationship. I’ve seen everything from a man who had multiple girlfriends at the same time but didn’t reveal that to any of them; to a man who bought the woman lots of clothing not because she liked it, but because that’s the image he wanted her to portray; to a man who erupted in violence and foul language without warning; to a man who repeatedly borrowed money without paying it back; to a man who actually stole money.

In each case the woman, while acknowledging her discomfort over the hurtful behavior, stayed in the relationship because she could see (or sense) the wonderful aspects of his character that were also present. She didn’t want to walk away from a chance at true love. She recognized that, like all of us, he was a flawed human being and did not want to abandon him because he wasn’t perfect; she wanted to work with him to create a healthy relationship. So she characterized the inner turmoil as a conflict between her head and her heart: her generous and loving heart wanted to shower him with affection and caring and give him every chance to change his ways, while her cold and rational head was telling her to walk away.

What she didn’t recognize was that her desire to be generous and give him every chance to change his ways didn’t arise from her heart – from Love – but from her own need to prove herself lovable. After all, he would only be willing to change his ways for someone who was “worth it.” (Not to mention that the very ability to help him change would prove how committed, talented and loving she was.) But he didn’t change his ways, because he didn’t yet have the awareness of his own inner fears and judgments that led him to those behaviors in the first place. And so the two of them remained locked for a while in a confining and endlessly repeating dance of dysfunction, one that kept reinforcing her false but unconscious belief that she wasn’t lovable - and the equally false belief that he could prove to her that she was. She stayed in the dance because she needed the proof.

The true heart knows nothing of need. It knows only real Love, and it knows Love is who we are. We cannot need what we already are. The true heart is loving, of course, but also eternally wise. It has a faculty for reason that lies far above and beyond our analytical mind’s tendency to compartmentalize, analyze and judge. Within the true heart there can be no conflict, because wisdom and reason naturally flow from Love, and because Love knows that oneness is the fundamental state of our being.

So in her true heart, she found the truth she was seeking. She recognized that all the wonderful qualities she saw in him were real, but also that, in his fear of being unlovable, he didn’t recognize them in himself. She realized that he wasn’t yet ready to be the kind of partner she wanted. And she discovered that she didn’t have to choose between being generous and forgiving or walking away: she could do both. She could walk away for now, generously releasing him from her judgments and her demands for change. Without any expectations for a particular form of relationship, she could leave him and still love him. She could move on with her life, secure in the knowledge that love is always present when we are present, because Love is who we are.

I’m not saying we should walk away from a relationship any time our partner exhibits behavior that is troubling to us. I am saying that we should consult the wisdom of our true heart rather than succumb to either defensiveness or judgment. Let’s take the time to get curious about our own behavior. A healthy, mature relationship is one in which we can acknowledge our fears, explore our true motivations and commit to healing our wounds, while holding a willing and loving space for our partner to do the same. And that kind of willingness and commitment can only arise from a Love that already knows love can never be lost.

So this Valentine’s Day, let’s stop looking for proof that we are lovable. Let’s embrace the truth that we are Love, and explore the many and varied ways we want to express that love in the world. Let’s honor the true heart by listening to its wise and loving counsel. Let’s trust that we are inherently whole. This Valentine’s Day, let’s celebrate true Love.

Copyright © 2010

Suzanne E. Eder