EMANATE

Love Without an Object: What if Love isn’t Something We Find, but Something We Become?

I have spent a lifetime loving people.

Sometimes beautifully. Sometimes imperfectly. Sometimes with expectations I didn’t even realize I had.

Like most of us, I learned to associate love with someone.

• A partner.

• A child.

• A parent.

• A friend.

Someone to love and hopefully someone who loved me back.

But lately I’ve been considering something much bigger.

What if love doesn’t actually require an object?

What if love originates within us?

Not as sentimentality. Not romance. Not sexuality. Not the intoxicating rush of being wanted.

• Just love.

A state of being that exists before we decide where to direct it.

I recently read something that put words around an experience I’ve had many times but never quite knew how to explain: love can emanate from within us and extend outward without needing anything in return.

And when I read that, something clicked.

Because I’ve felt that kind of love.

I’ve felt tremendous love for people I didn’t want anything from.

• No sex.

• No romance.

• No possession.

• No promise that they would stay.

• No requirement that they love me the same way.

I’ve looked at another human being and simply wanted good things for them.

• Peace.

• Joy.

• Freedom.

• Healing.

• Abundance.

I’ve felt it toward my children, friends, people I’ve served, people I’ve barely known, and occasionally even people with whom I’ve struggled.

And perhaps those moments have taught me more about love than romance ever could. Because nothing needed to happen next.

• I didn’t need to own the experience.

• I didn’t need reassurance.

• I didn’t need the relationship defined.

• I could simply love.

Love and relationship are not the same thing.

That’s an uncomfortable distinction I’ve learned along the way. A relationship is simply a structure between people. Love is what we bring to it, or don’t.

• Love is what we bring into it.

Which means being in a relationship doesn’t necessarily mean we’re loving.

• We can be married and frightened.

• We can be sexually intimate and profoundly disconnected.

• We can say “I love you” while controlling, manipulating, rescuing, clinging, demanding or keeping score.

• And conversely, we can profoundly love someone without possessing them at all.

That distinction has me examining something in myself:

• How much of what I’ve called love throughout my life was actually love, and how much was my need to feel safe, chosen, desired or necessary?

That’s not an indictment. It’s an invitation. Because our wounds are clever.

• Fear can dress itself beautifully. It can call itself devotion.

• Attachment can call itself commitment.

• Possessiveness can call itself passion.

• Rescuing can call itself compassion.

• And dependency can whisper, I just love you so much.

Maybe.

But perhaps the better question is:

• Does my love make you freer, or does it make you responsible for me?

That’s a hell of a question.

I can want you without needing to possess you.

This may be the distinction I’m beginning to understand.

• Healthy love doesn’t require indifference.

• Detachment doesn’t mean I stop caring.

Quite the opposite.

• I can love someone enormously.

• I can want them beside me.

• I can miss them.

• Desire them.

• Dream with them.

• Build something beautiful with them.

All the while understanding that they are not mine. They are a sovereign human being choosing to share some portion of this extraordinary life with me.

That means I can say:

• I want you in my life, without secretly meaning:

• I need you to remain exactly where I put you so that I can be okay.

Those sentences look similar, but they are worlds apart.

• One is love accompanied by freedom.

• The other is fear negotiating for security.

And I’m discovering that perhaps the deepest love contains a strange paradox:

• I can love you completely while releasing my demand for a particular outcome.

That’s difficult.

Maybe that’s why it’s sacred.

Love doesn’t become smaller when it isn’t romantic.

We have somehow elevated romantic love above nearly every other expression of it.

But some of the deepest love I’ve experienced had nothing whatsoever to do with romance.

• Sitting with someone who was hurting.

• Putting my hands on another human being with the simple intention of helping them feel better.

• Serving someone without needing recognition.

• Watching one of my daughters become fully herself.

• Standing beside a friend going through hell.

• Wishing someone well even when our paths were separating.

Those experiences weren’t lesser forms of love. Perhaps they were some of its purest expressions.

Because love wasn’t asking:

• What am I getting?

It was simply asking:

• What can I give?

And sometimes the answer was nothing more than presence.

Maybe we have been looking in the wrong direction.

We spend enormous amounts of our lives searching for love.

• Dating

• Choosing

• Chasing

• Longing

Trying to become desirable enough that someone will finally give us the thing we believe we’re missing.

But what if the search itself contains a misunderstanding?

What if another person cannot give me love in the way I’ve imagined because love is already one of my capacities?

• Another person can awaken it.

• Receive it.

• Reflect it.

• Magnify it.

• Challenge it.

• Share it.

But perhaps they cannot be its source.

Maybe the source is already here.

• Within me.

• Within you.

And then relationship becomes something entirely different.

Not two incomplete people desperately trying to fill each other’s empty spaces.

But two people arriving with something to offer.

• Here is my life.

• Here is my heart.

• Here is my freedom.

• Here is my love.

• Let’s see what we can create together.

And if that’s true, perhaps the great work of love isn’t finding the right person.

It’s becoming a person capable of loving without possession, caring without controlling, giving without disappearing, receiving without clinging, loving without expectation, and remaining open even when life refuses to follow the script.

I’m nowhere near finished learning that.

But I know I’ve experienced it.

Those moments when my heart has been completely open and nothing was required from the person standing in front of me.

• No bargain.

• No transaction.

• No future guaranteed.

Just the quiet recognition:

I love you.

• Not because you’re mine.

• Not because you complete me.

• Not because I need you to love me back.

• Not because I need my love to live somewhere.

• But because love is here.

And for this moment, I get to give it away.