The Ways In Which We Limit Love

Love has a way of making us believe that it is breaking apart slowly. The little fights and the little distances and the little inabilities to trust make us think that our heart is chipping away, one tiny broken fragment at a time. You both wander out into your own wilderness and if you don’t hold tight to each other’s hands, you wander further and further until that person you were so intimately tied to is just a speck of light in the distance. It can all happen as you lay next to that person each night, because life either pulls you together or breaks you away.

People say you can lose yourself in love, but they don’t tell you that you can lose each other, too, that you can kiss without feeling and you can have sex without connecting and you can convince yourself that the love you have is not enough of the things you need. You can be alone while together. You can sit next to each other on the couch and watch television and feel as though your hearts are on opposite sides of the world. You can wonder how the lines of your love ever connected, how this ever worked, how you can extricate yourself in the most painless way.

We don’t love from our hearts, not really. We love from our need. We don’t hold onto who the other person is; we hold onto who we want them to be. Because, underneath the incompatibilities we think exist, is a human being with a vulnerable heart that wants to be felt. We love our facades, but not our vulnerabilities. And so, that’s what we ask of another person. We see only their facade, our own projection of who they are based on our own perception that we’ve accumulated throughout the years. We say we love them for who they are, but if we were truly vulnerable with each other, how could love even have an opposite? How could love never not be there?

We actually believe our love has limits. This is a foundational, insidious belief that we carry around with us. We think there’s a beginning and end to love. We say that we are in love or out of love or that we stopped loving, which would imply that the love we have to give and receive is finite, that we could actually use it all up. We attribute our worldly struggles to our plight, the unfairness of life. We think if we don’t have a partner, we are unloved. We are unable to see that the one everlasting component of love is that it is limitless.

The thing about love is that it’s an intangible, indefinable light. It is deeply felt, but it cannot be held. It is like faith: you believe it’s there or you don’t and if you believe, you possess it, but not believing doesn’t mean it’s not there. Yet, we are humans and we add our humanity onto love. We condition love and we bullet-point list love and we checklist love and we limit the love we give and the love we receive and we put these little boxes around the ways in which love can be expressed.

We can be with someone and forget that the love that is there doesn’t actually chip away, that our heart doesn’t need regenerating because it was never broken. It can seem that way: the distance between two humans can seem too far, but the distance between two hearts, well, there is no distance. That’s the thing we forget. We forget that our human need to define and to categorize and to box us in restricts love. Our need to appease our fears and the symptomatic ways in which we do that appeasing means that we are not without love, we have simply forgotten to remember that love is immeasurable and ever-present.

I call this the soul capacity. We have a human capacity and a soul capacity. The human capacity is filled with all the ways in which we block ourselves from love out of fear. The soul capacity is all the ways in which we remember the transformational properties of remembering to choose to expand into love more and more as each day passes.

In any relationship, there is a beginning and end, but not in the way that we think. Relationships of any kind begin out of a soul need for each other: to grow, to learn, to understand ourselves in relation to another. But a relationship never ends because of a lack of love. We may think that’s why it ends. We may attribute it to thinking we no longer care or we no longer love or we’re angry or they made a mistake or we made a mistake. And, while, those are reasons that we use to describe a human capacity, they are not our soul’s reason.

The truth is that we float in and out of each other’s lives for any number of worldly reasons, but we do not leave our lives out of a lack of love. Because, there is never not love. Whatever the relationship, it unravels because that is the natural end to that partnership. Your soul’s reason for coming together has come to completion. But, love? Love is the connection that never breaks. Love is the limitless light that encompasses us if only we simply remember to see it.