Intentional Love

We have been speaking of “the teachings of wisdom” and we have been trying to see the work of love in the light of these teachings.  We have been trying to understand the work of love as the task of supporting each other’s search for the life of meaning that wisdom tells us is possible and necessary for humanity.

The flash and glory of falling in love can awaken us, body and soul, to a great unknown within ourselves.  But when we live together and face the day-to-day details of life, the continual pressures and complications, the fears and resentments, the disappointments and the strangely hollow triumphs, the everydayness of it all, the physical, emotional, and mental labyrinth of “life itself,” how can we go on loving each other in a way that is more than only a yearning for another beginning?  Another beginning of love, a beginning that, like all human processes, must inevitably come to a crossroads where something intentional and conscious is needed.  To be “romantic,” in the derogatory sense of the word, is to turn away again and again from the crossroads of the process of love, the place where what is automatically given to us by nature must be joined by something intentional from ourselves.  To be romantic, in the derogatory sense, is to yearn only for automatic love. But the work of love begins where automatic love ends.

The wisdom teachings do not speak much of automatic love, or about what we nowadays call “relationships.”  This is so much so that one might even wonder if men and women of other cultures and worlds experienced anything like the difficulties and rewards that are part of intimate relationships in our culture.  In fact, it is probably true that in our industrial and postindustrial society, with all the social changes that have been wrought by technology, the psychological demands of living together are startlingly different in many respects.

But that is not the main point.  The point is that when the traditions of wisdom speak about love, they are speaking almost without exception of love that is intentional love “at the crossroads” and beyond.  Confusion enters in mainly because the love spoken of by wisdom is mistakenly viewed as existing on the same level as automatic love.  It is a serious error to confuse the kind of love that is given to us by nature with the kind of love we must work for.  And, of course, we will never even imagine the work of love if we assume that the higher forms of love are on the same level as the love that is given to us automatically.

- Excerpt from Jacob Needleman’s book, “The Wisdom of Love”