229. A love like this lights up the whole sky

A friend of mine was asking what I meant when I said in my article #226 that most people in romantic relationships don’t love, they want something. She cited the example of her marriage of more than 30 years until her husband died and said it was a very loving marriage. Yet she and her husband had times of anger where they didn’t speak to each other for several days or longer, she said. “But just because of those times how could you say we didn’t have love?” she asked me.

My response was that any action we take in a relationship that’s designed to control the other person’s behavior isn’t love, its manipulation. We want our partner to change. In the case of anger we’re saying, “I’m going to make you hurt bad enough so you won’t do that again.” Whether our action is in the form of withdrawal or sharp words to punish, or being extra-nice, if our action aims at getting our partner to do what we want or stop doing what we don’t want, it’s not love. On the other hand, we’re happy to love when things are going our way.

We each know when our love isn’t pure or genuine – when we’re doing something we don’t really want to do so we can get something back. And our partner and the world knows it when we show our anger or disappointment when the reward we expected doesn’t come. Have you ever heard anyone say something like, “I went to the symphony with her but now she won’t even come to the races with me.”? Well, there you have it!

Hafiz, a great Persian spiritual poet of the 1300s wrote, “Even after all this time the sun does not say to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. It lights up the whole sky.”

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer