The Spaces Between

Words always seem to fall short when trying to define the complex concepts of emotion. I am always left with describing what emotions are like or defining them with examples. Of all the feelings, “love” is probably the most difficult to accurately describe in words. Its true meaning is individually specific and yet universally nebulous. I have many examples of people and events in my life that demonstrate love but they represent the broad strokes of what love looks like but not its naked essence. What is love?

I have a sketch hanging in my apartment that I purchased in an auction years ago. My initial interest in the piece was driven by the challenge of trying to figure out what image the artist was trying to convey. I stood before the drawing, staring at what seemed to be a random collection of lines until finally the image of a man lying on a bed with a cat surfaced. The artist had used a minimum number strokes with a pencil to mold the blank parts of the canvas into the image. My first inspection of the work focused on the pencil marks not the canvas. It was counter-intuitive for me to look at the paper rather than the different markings to see what was being depicted by the artist but that is where the image lived. Perhaps that is where the meaning of love is hiding…in the spaces between.

My first introduction to the concept of love was very early in my Catholic school education. I was told that, “You can only love another if you love yourself.” It was a concept that was impossible to integrate into my life at the time because it was a message that was conveyed to me in the context of other constructs like sin, guilt, and subservient conformity. I found it very hard to love myself when I was being constantly told that I was a sinner who needed forgiveness on a regular basis. I filed the idea away because it seemed like a beautiful thing that someday I might enjoy feeling about myself.

In my young adulthood, I learned my second lesson. I was complaining to a friend one day about a former girlfriend I had seen at a bar with another  man. I ranted for a time about the cold and egregious behavior of this former lover as my friend sat quietly listening. When I finally stopped to allow her to agree with my assessment, she simply said this, “You want to play with all the women and when you are done with them you expect them to join a convent and that is not how the world works”. Her brutally honest statement gave me my first glimpse at the difference between love and possession. This lesson I buried in my subconscious, unable to grasp the maturity of the notion but unable to dismiss it because I knew it was absolutely true.

In my forties, I decided that some therapy would be a good thing for me so I began to seek professional help on a weekly basis. On one occasion my therapist suggested that perhaps my problems with relationships and love stemmed from the idea of “unconditional love”. It was her opinion that unconditional love could only flow from parents to their children and even then it was not a certainty. My search for unconditional love and my willingness to sabotage relationships in order to test the concept was part of my problem. Being afraid of eventual abandonment I would unconsciously create the end to avoid the other person from leaving me first. I was searching for the perfect instead of living and enjoying the good. Love is never perfect and it is conditional. Once again a lesson learned and some clarity achieved but without context it was also just another concept stored away in my brain.

It was some years later, when I was talking to an another good friend, that the final piece of the puzzle of love was revealed to me. In retrospect it seems obvious now but when it was originally suggested I did not see its deep and true value. My friend told me that people do not love the same. In fact, love between individuals is never equal. It ebbs and flows between two people like the tide, always moving in one direction or another but never does it reach a true equilibrium. Love is fundamentally unequal and in order for it to grow this reality must be accepted.

When I put these four revelations together I able to define the image on my canvas. Self-love is fundamental to the ability to love another because without it real love is replaced by the quest for validation. Love is never going to be perfect or without conditions and to measure its value against perfection dooms it to failure. Love is neither static or equal; it is felt uniquely and therefore its expression manifests itself in infinite forms. True love places the happiness of another over one’s need to possess them. The greatest form of love is that which exists without the ownership of another’s freedom. This is my picture of love; just like the apparently random lines in the sketch on my wall the image of love lies in the spaces between.