Fear of Love

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear--fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety. --Henry Mencken 

Perfect love casts out all fear. –St John

So what is it that causes so many of us to choose to live without love, or at least to live with so little of it, anyway? We play around the edges, we flirt with it, and we think about it. We want to give and receive love but “When Love Comes to Town” (BB King) it’s off to the Shadow Lands.

Too costly

Too dangerous

Too demanding

Too painful

Too, too, too

This is why so many people live out of fear, rather than love. Look at what drives and informs so many of our decisions: fear of rejection, fear of pain, fear of exposure, fear of not fitting in, fear of losing, fear of being wrong, fear of doing wrong, fear of being laughed at, fear of failure, fear of not being enough, here a fear, there a fear, everywhere a fear, fear. Here we are, created by and for love, choosing to live in fear, or at least choosing to keep our distance from an all-out-love for God, others, and for life. What’s up with that?

Yet each man kills the thing he loves


By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,

And some when they are old;

Some strangle with the hands of Lust,

Some with the hands of Gold;

The kindest use a knife, because

The dead so soon grow cold.

--Oscar Wilde, Ballad of Reading Jail

People kill love with bitterness, manipulative flattery, cowardice, or betrayal. He killed love when he was old; she murdered love when she was young. Some drowned love in lust, some with religion. Some strangled love to death because it got in the way of the pursuit of gold. And all were driven by fear.

If we could only see that the consequences of fear are far more costly than the risks of love. Fear robs and destroys. Opening our hearts to giving and receiving love enriches and enlivens.  As fear is self-centered and self-protective, it constricts our souls and, thereby, diminishes us. Love opens our souls to God, life, and others, and, in so doing, leads to our becoming the human that God created us to become.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2013

Quotes on Love

On Keeping Your Heart Safe From Pain

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. –CS Lewis

The Heart’s Filter  

We accept the love we think we deserve. –Stephen Chbosky

Being Present

You can’t love anyone unless you can be sure of his presence when you need him. –Goethe

Words of affection and endearment are wonderful. All I can truly know of your love, however, is what you show me. –Monte

The Greatest Happiness

The greatest happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved, loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. --Victor Hugo

Hell

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love. 

--Dostoevsky

Beauty

Do you love me because I am beautiful,

or am I beautiful because you love me?

--Cinderella

Being Romantic

Being romantic” means treating the relationship as important, behaving in ways that underscore its importance. Flowers can be a lovely gift, or a meaningless gesture. There are people who know how to be romantic in a hovel; there are people who do not know how to be romantic in a palace. --Nathaniel Branden

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are!

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place. –Zora Neale Hurston

Yours, Mine, or Ours?

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. –Aristotle

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. –Emily Bronte

He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.  --Leo Tolstoy

Amazing

If she's amazing, she won't be easy. If she's easy, she won't be amazing. If she's worth it, you wont give up. If you give up, you're not worthy. ... Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for. –Bob Marley

Better Than Your Dreams

You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams. –Dr. Seuss

Love is Now

What is love? 'Tis not hereafter;

Present mirth hath present laughter;

What's to come is still unsure:

In delay there lies not plenty …

   --Shakespeare, Sonnet 91

Love is Eternal

It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal. –E. M. Forster, A Room With a View

  

Affection and Happiness

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives. –CS Lewis

The Test of Absence

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires. --Francois de La Rochefoucauld

The Triggering of Human Vitality

Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else. –Jose Ortega y Gasset

Tripping Over v Falling in Love

When you trip over love, it is easy to get up. But when you fall in love, it is impossible to stand again. –Einstein

Get Me Right

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not. –Andre Gide

What Love Does and Doesn’t Do

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. –St Paul

The Power of Love

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength,

While loving someone deeply gives you courage.

--Lao Tzu

Fear + Caution = Fatality

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

--Bertrand Russell

Why Do You Need Me?

Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.” Mature love says, “I need you because I love you.” –Eric Fromm

Love Sucks

After writing Love is Not A Thing, I ran across these two quotes. I wish I had used these rather than the two I did when juxtaposing the two opposing perspectives on romantic love!

There is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy – Charles Bukowski

Cupid is a sadist.

Love is All

Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all. --Soren Kierkegaard

Love is not stingy, passing out care and affection in spoonfuls, as if the well was about to run dry. Love flows and pours itself out, continuously immersing the beloved in cherishing demonstrations and expressions of attention, support, care, and affection.

Love does not treat the beloved’s heart as if it were a buffet table filled with foods both wanted and unwanted. “Yum. I’ll take this ... O yuk, but not that! In fact, would you please take this off of the table?” Love swallows the whole heart (“takes all”) with all of its light and darkness, joys and sorrows, strengths and foibles.

Love compels us to go the extra-mile, forgive 70x7, lay down our lives, and give the best of all that we are and have. And it does this day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year.

Love freely and humbly receives love. Love takes all the love that is given, with gratitude, appreciation, and respect.

Love is all. We were created for love by the God Who is Love. Love binds us together and empowers us. Love drives you to your knees and then propels you heavenward. Love pulls you into the deepest parts of your soul where you dig even deeper and deeper, becoming capable of an even greater love, and then impels you toward the beloved, before whom you stand with a naked soul, giving all, and taking all.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2013

A Most Important Conversation for Lovers

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. –Emily Bronte

“But when we were dating, we agreed on all the major issues, theologically, philosophically, socially…” His voice disappeared into an abyss of agony. But I had known him long enough, and well enough, to know what he was thinking. “We dotted all the i’s, crossed all the t’s. When we were first married, intellectually, we were on the same page. How is it that we woke up and found that we were not even in the same book?”

“He’s a wonderful man, a loving father… a really great guy. Yet, other than our children, we have almost nothing in common. He wants to sit around and watch TV every night. I want to play games that will stimulate us intellectually, go to a museum, or talk about things that matter. Well, matter to me, anyway. Painful thing is that nothing much matters to him.”

What is tormenting these couples is the lack of mutuality where it matters most: a shared sense of life. What I mean by a sense of life is how we experience and approach our existence in the world, which comes from our core beliefs and attitudes regarding life and our selves. *

A man who experiences life as a couch to lounge on while waiting for death, or as a competition to see who can make the most money before the game is called, does not have the same sense of life as a woman who experiences her existence as a quest for meaningfulness and significance. If these two people marry, there is very little hope for a deep and intimate relationship. Not unless one of them is miraculously transformed, anyway.

If she approaches life with faith, hope, and love, and he with fear, hopelessness, and cynicism, then there will be no mutuality at the very heart of the relationship. It doesn’t matter that they grew up together in the same church, espouse the same beliefs, and vote along the same party lines. The disparity between their respective senses of life will be a barrier to an authentic and abiding emotional connection.

What this man and woman was saying was, “I feel totally invisible.” The agony they each were describing is that of not being loved and appreciated for who they are. O, he may admire this or that attribute but, as her sense of life is the opposite of his, he doesn’t see the essence of her identity. Consequently, she is not being loved for who-she-is … and she knows it. And then there is the seemingly insurmountable barrier of “appreciating” a sense of life that she experiences as being so utterly alien to her own.

When facing serious conflicts, so many couples argue over work, or friendships, or children, or politics, or spiritual matters, or what to do on holidays, with few or no resolutions that move the relationship forward. The reason for this is that the real issue is far deeper, and far scarier: the challenge is at the level of their sense of life. Here is where he must be honest with his mate and his self. Here is the arena where she must seek to make herself visible: respectfully, lovingly, and boldly.

______________

* "A sense of life is the emotional form in which we experience our deepest view of existence and our relationship to existence. It is, in effect, the emotional corollary of a metaphysics--of a personal metaphysics, one might say--reflecting the subconsciously held sum of our broadest and deepest attitudes and conclusions concerning the world, life, and ourselves." Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Romantic Love

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2013

Romantic Love and Your Soul

Romantic love has a purpose, an enormous purpose. Its task is to free you from the bubble of practicality and ordinary busyness, to reveal the fact that you have a soul and that life is far more mysterious than you imagined it to be. –Thomas Moore, The Dark Nights of the Soul

You can’t stop thinking of her, wanting to be with her, fantasizing about a life with her. You’ve always considered yourself a very practical person, but, now, it’s all flowers, holding hands, long meaningful conversations, and breathless anticipation for your next date. And you never want to hang up when she is on the phone. What’s up with that?

Your emotions are all over the map for him. He is the sun, moon, and stars of your universe. But you have been deeply wounded in the past and don’t want to go through that again. Do you throw open that final door to her: the one that opens up the deepest part of your heart? “Yes! I know it’s risky and maybe even irrational but love transcends the rationale of every day decision-making. Love has its own reasons.” You burst out laughing at yourself and open that last door.

Mesdames et Messieurs, your soul bids you welcome!

Romantic love is one of the chief means for introducing you to the fact that life is about more than analyzing and utilizing, goals and strategies, food and clothing. This love opens you to the mystery of your soul. Rather than organizing your life solely around “what’s practical,” you now begin arranging your life according to what and who is feeding your soul, as well: what expresses your soul’s deepest needs and desires.

          When you are in love you become aware of your soul’s needs and longings: a new reality that, up until love came along, you either ignored or ran from. It is this love that causes you to break the chains of ordinariness and practicality, so that you can live with “imagination and emotion.” (Moore) In other words, it is Romantic Love that leads you to stop living solely out of your head and begin paying attention to your soul.

            Romantic love cannot be treated like a chemical to be analyzed. Love is not a mathematical formula or a syllogism. Love transcends logic and reasons, practicalities and feasibilities. Love has its own rationale, its own way of being in the world. As love flows from the soul, this stands to reason, as the soul is as mysterious as love itself.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2013 

Love is Not a Thing

Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise. –Victor Hugo

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion. –Miguel de Unamuno

Depending on with whom you talk: love is life-affirming, the Angel of Death, mysterious, hormones, heart healing, heart wrenching, makes the world go around, destroys your universe, makes everything more beautiful, is an illusion, a kiss from God, a curse of the gods, lasts a life time, is ephemeral.

There are differences, of course, between loving love and loving the beloved, between giddy infatuation and having your soul saturated and satiated by love for the other. All too often, I think many people experience love as a negative because of confusing one for the other, either in their selves or the other.

I don’t believe that love goes “wrong”: I think people go wrong headed and wrong hearted. Many times this happens because we so often abuse love by taking it – him or her—for granted. We act as if love is a thing we keep in our pockets for special occasions rather than a process that needs constant caring attention. A loving relationship is growing and deepening or it is shriveling and dying: it is never static. Not for long, anyway.  

Love is a verb: it is a process, an action, and a consistent behavior. Love serves, supports, and is caring in the smallest of details. Again, however, we have a tendency towards turning this process into a “thing.” When we do this, our relationship inevitably becomes stuck on going nowhere and headed toward dying. When William Faulkner says, “Don’t be a ‘writer.’ Be ‘writing, ’” he is pointing out the difference between the “thing” (writer) and the process (writing). In the same manner, what I am saying here is, “Don’t be a ‘lover.’ Be ‘loving.’”

Yes, love can be painful. True love is vulnerable. This vulnerability allows her to crawl inside the deepest parts of your soul. And sometimes she will do this with cleats on. As will you do the same in hers. Yet, if it is love that we have for the other, I think we would handle this pain far more wisely if we would see it as part of the process of being loving: that part which deepens our souls and makes us capable of an even deeper and stronger love.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2013