Loving a Person

Everything in this book has been about a love on a scale far beyond us. In this chapter I will use the myth's language freely, he knows this, he does that, because it is the clearest way I know to describe a practice. Remember that it is a picture of a structure, and that the practice is yours. He is the Unknowable Future. She is the Immutable Past. We are children playing at the edge of their dance.

And yet the question most readers bring to a book about love is a smaller one, and more urgent. How do I love the people in my life?

This chapter is my attempt at an answer. It is not a method. It is what I think his love looks like when a particular someone tries to practice it.

Begin by assuming she is whole

The first thing he knows about her is that she is complete. Not that she will be complete once he has finished. That she is, already, even in the moment of her disturbance.

Try beginning there with the people you love. Your partner, your child, your friend, your aging parent. Act, before anything else, as someone who knows they are not broken. That whatever is wrong is a disturbance at the surface of something that was never damaged.

This changes everything about how you approach them. You stop treating them as a project. You stop arriving with repairs. You begin to treat their trouble as a ripple across stillness, rather than as evidence of a defect you must fix.

You will not love without conditions

Here is something I want to say plainly, because a book that keeps praising unconditioned love can leave its readers feeling like failures.

You cannot love without conditions. Neither can I. We are not the white light; we are hues on the wheel. To be a particular someone is to stand at an angle, and the angle is not a flaw to be corrected. Human love is real precisely because it is conditioned. Conditioned does not mean selfish or transactional. It means distinguishable: this love, for this person, from this place.

So the useful question is never whether your love has conditions. It does. The useful question is what kind of condition is alive in it.

And the sentence at the center of this book asks something smaller of you than unconditioned love, and much harder. It asks that you not require the beloved to change in order to be loved.

Most of what we call love is a project with a person attached. We say we love someone, and we mean we love a version of them that is coming, and we call the waiting patience. He does not love her that way. He loves her because she is complete. You will not manage that perfectly. You are vibrating; that is the job. But you can notice which of the two you are doing, and the noticing is available now.

Listen for the design

The second thing he knows is that the design is hers.

So listen for theirs. When someone you love is struggling, the temptation is to tell them what to do. You may even be right. But a solution you hand them is a design you built, and they will feel it as yours, not theirs. They may follow it and resent it. They may not follow it at all.

Instead, ask. Wait. Ask again. Listen past the first answer, which is often the answer they think you want, to the second or third, which is often the one they already knew. When they say the thing they knew, you will both recognize it. That recognition is the sign that you have drawn out the blueprint rather than imposing one.

This takes much longer than giving advice. It is also the only kind of help that tends to last, because it is the only kind that belongs to the person you are helping.

Provide, without a ledger

The third thing he knows is that love keeps no ledger.

Once you have heard what is needed, provide it, if you can. Without bargaining. Without keeping score. Without the quiet expectation that this will be repaid.

You will fail at this sometimes. Particular someones keep ledgers; it is part of being a self. But notice when you are doing it. Notice the small resentment that says, after all I have done. That resentment is a sign that something other than love has crept in. Not that you were wrong to give, but that you have begun to give in exchange.

Leave the distance intact

The fourth thing he knows is that love does not merge.

He does not try to become her. He honors the distance between them. He respects her singularity.

This may be the hardest of all for people who love intensely. We want to be close. We want to share everything. We want the other person to see the world as we do. And sometimes, in that wanting, we press so close that the other person has no room to be themselves.

Love that respects singularity leaves room. It lets your child become someone you would not have designed. It lets your partner have a self you do not fully understand. It lets your friend make a choice you would not make. It does not withdraw. It stays near. But it stays near in a way that leaves the other person whole on their own terms.

Measure by stillness

The fifth thing he knows is how to tell whether love has done its work.

Is she still? Is she complete? Is she at rest?

Ask this about the people you love. Not, did I try hard? Not, did I mean well? Not, did they thank me? Simply: are they more at rest than before?

If they are, you loved them, past tense. You can let it be finished. You do not need to keep striving once the restoration has arrived, and you do not need them to acknowledge it.

If they are not, love is still in progress. Keep listening. The design may be somewhere you have not looked yet.

And let yourself be loved

Finally, the thing he does not need but you do.

Let yourself be met. Let the people who love you listen for your design. Tell them, when they get it right, that they got it right. Not because love requires a return, but because you are a particular someone, and particular someones are restored by being loved, and there are people in your life who would like nothing more than to restore you.

You are whole, too. You have a design, too. And you are standing, like everyone, in the one place where love is ever felt.