I’m sitting here with my ‘love mug’ - a cheap ceramic curio my son bought me from the school Valentine’s Day market - wondering about this thing called ‘Love’ and everything it’s teaching me.
The Hollywood-Disney fantasies, 80s romcoms and Spandex pop culture give us this illusion of love that comes easily, is all-consuming and covered with neon-lycra’d passion.
Starship’s promise ‘we can build this dream together’ and the ‘happily ever afters’ of my childhood are responsible for much of my illusory ideas about what love is and probably have a lot to do with feelings of dissatisfaction in marriages and families the world over.
The truth is: love is complicated and it is hard; it involves suffering and it involves growth. It is hard to define because it leads us to transcend our limits.
The late American psychiatrist M. Scott Peck is honest enough to call love a discipline which he describes as the means of human spiritual evolution. And evolution - ‘letting go’ of our old and potentially harmful patterns of thinking and behaving - requires awareness and the pain of seeing ourselves as we really are. But through it all, there is growth and the eventual ecstasy of self-acceptance.
Love, by Peck’s admission, is too deep, too mysterious and too large to be truly understood or measured, or limited within the framework of words.
He resists a definition but to his credit, he gives it a go. Peck defines love like this: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” So what does that actually mean or look like, especially for the parents among us?
I’m going to hazard a guess. It means being prepared to examine one’s own conscious and even unconscious motives in how we feel, think or behave towards another. Are my controlling ways and attempts to protect my children by not letting them face disappointment, or explore the limits of their own independence, borne out of love? Or are they borne from a place of fear and self-preservation? We want to avoid their pain and ours by perhaps molly-coddling, and restricting their natural inclination to explore and allow life’s lessons show them who they really are. Much easier to keep them 'safe' by curtailing their independence, and making them into miniature versions of ourselves.
It’s natural to want to avoid pain, but it doesn’t lead to an evolved sense of ‘self’ whereby we learn to embrace loss, uncertainty, change and suffering. To let go and allow ourselves to experience these things would actually make us more human and open us up to our need for God. As Scott Peck writes it would ‘grow us into a larger’ state of being rather than keeping us safe in our ‘comfort zone’, which is a false promise anyway. The reality is that we really have no control and cannot predict tomorrow.
I have many of my own examples of battling with this kind of love. Among the most recent is my grieving and resisting my tween growing up. A few months ago she was invited to a weekend away with a trusted friend. I had to work hard to overcome my anxiety and my fear that something would go terribly wrong and I wouldn’t be there. In some sense, it was a foretaste of a separation to come. One day, she'd no longer need me as she once did and I would have to carve out a different identity for myself and a new relationship with her.
To hold her back, because I ‘love her too much’ would not be fair. It would curb her capacity to understand or test her own limits, to learn to be comfortable with 'herself' out there in the world. And to know that she could survive emotionally, psychologically and spiritually - regardless of whether the weekend away was a success or not.
Love always involves a choice, albeit a very hard one. The choice is either to stay ‘safe’ within familiar patterns and in my comfort zone, or to join in with the rest of humanity in confronting all that it means to be human, to lean into suffering and the joy of surrender.