A Meditation on Love

I wrote the following meditation in September, riding the high of a unique social experience among a unique group of people. Mere days after writing this, after I’d rejoined my vastly different life in St. Louis, I felt worlds away from the words (and feelings) awakened and recorded. Yet I undoubtedly wrote them. I vividly recall stopping at a rest stop in western New York, on my way back to Albany from the wedding in Ithaca, my thoughts and feelings aching to pour themselves into writing. Perhaps strong feelings insist on being released, in writing or otherwise. And perhaps my writing while in school has remained dormant because I’ve been living an unfeeling life. Or, more likely, I’ve simply been making myself too busy to look inward and to vent my feelings, so I’ve simply been letting them pass. Whatever it is, I stand by my words from months ago, even if the sentiments now feel distant, inaccessible, and extremely vulnerable. I trust my past self enough to honor his words. Enjoy this meditation on love.

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I am not one to usually delve deeply into my emotional existence. At least not without a thick layer of philosophy and intellectual exposition. Frankly, I find the simple words we have to describe many of our human emotions to be troublingly simplistic and reductive. Sadness, anger, happiness, jealousy, love. As words, they hint at a shared human experience, yet beneath the surface of the words, we all define and experience these things in extremely different and unique ways. They are categories describing bundles of complex emotions, thoughts, and experiences, which can never be separate from a context—a moment in time—in which we are feeling them.

And yet, I am here to write about love.

I have just departed the wedding of two of my dear friends, and I am feeling sappy. But no, I’m not going to talk about their love. Well, not in the way that it is typically done (“Mawage is what bwings us together today”). No, I’m here to talk about my own profound and slightly bewildering experience of love with, toward, and among these two people and many of my dearest friends who joined me as guests.

Leading into this wedding, I admit that, amidst my great excitement to celebrate a three-day wedding with over a dozen of my closest friends and extended friends, I felt nervous. I felt nervous from a place of ego and self-centeredness. Life for me has felt uncertain and unmoored, at least for as long as I have maintained this blog, and more likely for my entire life. My life feels like a constant state of becoming, and rarely like a state of having arrived. (I think there is a healthy balance to be struck between the two.)

A wedding is a very public and unequivocal statement of arrival. Of permanence and stability. An anchor point in life, and a pivot point for an onward trajectory – all things that my ever-present unmooredness seeks so desperately that I fear I cannot help but feel downtrodden and dismayed at my own station in life in contrast to others’ success. When these feelings come over me, as they do sometimes at odd times—like when I witness other peoples’ deep talent and mastery of a craft or skill and am reminded that I have no such thing myself—I tend to withdraw, self-isolate, and decide that I do not belong.

So it was to my great relief and delight to discover that not only did I not experience any such feelings of despair or withdrawal, but I was truly overwhelmed by feelings of profound joy and what I can only describe simply as love for my friends’ happiness. In the world of consensual nonmonogamy, there is a term called “compersion” that is used to describe a form of joy felt from the joy of others. I believe this is exactly the word to describe the sort of love I was overwhelmed by.

To be sure, my ability to surrender to the unconditional positive regard for these peoples’ happiness is predicated on the fact that their love and their statement of arrival are not inaccessible to me. These friends have proven time and again their own irrevocable love and care for me. They have done so in spite of my own deeply programmed instinct to run, isolate, and insist that I am unwanted – a habit that comes from a place of self-preservation but paradoxically creates more harm for me than benefit. They have, through phone calls, texts, invitations, embraces, encouragements, gifts, glances, words, songs, persistence, and insistence, refused to let me run away into my own isolation and self-fulfilling loneliness.

How could I not love these people with the same generosity they give to me? And how could I feel anything other than that their love feeds directly into our collective love? It is this ineffable experiential knowing that another’s love is additive to a collective love accessible to all, rather than subtractive from my access to love, that is the root of the compersive experience.

I feel that I am learning what love is, and what love can be. It hints at an answer to the troubling question that I’ve faced many times: “Have I truly been in love? How would I know?”

Love requires both the courage to love and to be loved.

Love requires vulnerability and it requires courage—but I don’t think in the ways that it’s often conceived. It requires the courage to push beyond another’s resistance to love. It requires us to tap into our own positive regard for another human and to have the courage to embrace, accept, and love them despite their protestations and insistence of unworthiness. And it requires us (me), when faced with that courage, to make ourselves more and more vulnerable by allowing this love in. Allowing ourselves to accept that others see us as someone they want to love, and that we are worthy of that love, just as we are. It requires us to be courageous enough to lower our defenses, to look deep inside at what it is that wants to resist and push back against love. Love requires both the courage to love and to be loved.