So what is love?
Love is a process, not an event.
Love is fertile separateness, not sterile symbiosis.
Love is about maturity and growth, not baby infantilization.
Love is the triumph of experience over hope and wisdom over fantasy.
Now let me elaborate on these sentences and discuss with you the very idea and the very essence of this elusive thing, love.
In this dystopian reality we all inhabit in this horror world that we call ours, there's only one refuge, one sanctuary, and that is love.
But do we really know what it is?
We seem to conflate and confuse love with obsessive limerence. We identify or misidentified love with lust, especially sexual lust, and with infatuation.
But these are not love. They are sometimes aspects and dimensions of love, but they are not love itself, because love is not an event.
Love is a process. Love is not Disney. It's not smarmy. It's not saccharine. It's not abrupt and magical. That's not love.
Love, as I said, is a process. It's long. It's arduous. It's demanding. It's nonlinear. Two steps forward one step back.
Sometimes you see the loved one one way and then you see the same person another way, which makes it very difficult for you to love her or him.
And yet you overcome. You overcome these setbacks. You recoil. You go back to loving because this is love, an ongoing test of resilience, investment, of reality itself.
Love is never fantastic. Love is always real. And love is about the passage of time.
Love flies in the face of death and defies it because it's about life, and life is about duration, and duration is about survival.
Love is another name for survival.
Love is about being separate from the loved one, a kind of separateness that allows you to cross-fertilize each other, to enrich each other's lives, to bring the world into it without getting enmeshed, without merger, without fusing together, without becoming a single organism, without any symbiotic effect.
Within love, you are yourself more than ever.
Love is about becoming a better version of yourself, or at the very least, another version of yourself.
Love is dynamic. Love is not static. Love is not a snapshot. Love is not a snapshot. Love is a video.
And so love is about separateness and togetherness. The togetherness that is the separateness of the participants in love.
Because love requires participation. Love requires comparison. Love requires entrepreneurship. Love requires initiative. Love is an active, a dynamic thing.
Love is a full-time job. Love is an occupation, a vocation, an avocation, a hobby.
Love is everywhere, and when needed, it retreats and lets you be.
Giving each other space, giving each other the time needed to become, is an essential component of love.
When we see people entangled in each other, and meshed, when we see them merged and fused and indistinguishable from each other, that's not love. That is dependency. That is external regulation.
They use each other in order to regulate internal processes, their moods, their emotions, their cognitions.
This is not love. This is exploitation. This is dependency and clinging and neediness and the inability to let go.
If you do not let your partner separate from you, your partner can never evolve. There's no self-development and self-growth without the ability to walk away knowing that you are always welcome back.
This is the very concept of separation individuation in early childhood. This is the very concept of a secure base.
In love, you are each other's secure base in the sense that you're always there, always there, willing to understand and to accept within your boundaries. And boundaries are very important.
Love is not unconditional. Unconditional love is sick because it is maternal.
Within a mature adult love relationship, one should neverbe another person's mother or father. There's no paternal or maternal role. There no parentification this is sick love so love is about boundaries love is boundary love is an exchange of signals a communication an ongoing mode of communication about one's internal state and external expectations. Love, therefore, is a dialogue. It's a discourse which leads to maturation, which leads to evolution, which leads to becoming enhanced and empowered. As I said, a better or a different version of yourself. Love is not about regressing into childhood. Love is not about infantilization. Love is not about calling each other baby, babying each other. If you treat your partner as a child, as a baby, as a helpless being, you are not helping your partner. And if you're not helping your partner. And if you are not helping your partner, in which sense do you love her? Love therefore is the opposite, the antonym of a shared fantasy. Because within a shared fantasy, we assume parental roles going back to the womb, to the safety and comfort and soothing of a stage before we were born, before we had to confront reality, harsh and friction of being. And so an affair or a relationship which involves regression, infantilization, childlike or childish attributes, that is not love. That is the narcissistic shared fantasy. That is the borderlines idealization of the external partner. That is the codependence, emotional blackmail and parentification. None of it is love. It's a pathology.
Within a true love, within a real love, not azzath's love, but echt love. Within this kind of love, you're always an adult. You're always grown up. You're always empowered. You're always amplified and magnified.
You're always grown up, you're always empowered, you're always amplified and magnified. You're always seeking, venturing out, exploring and discovering the world around you, your environment, and above all, your loved one. Because to you, within a love affair, within a loving relationship, your loved one is always someone to be discovered, always someone to be explored, always someone to get to know better, the delight and the joy and the elation of realizing someone else, of being self-actualized by acquiring another person's knowledge and advice and succor and love and acceptance. It is this mutual interaction between two separate objects that create the togetherness as a third entity. The togetherness in true love is a third entity, exactly like a child.
And so no wonder that bringing children to the world is an act of love, because love itself is a third member of your couple.
And so love is a triumph of experience over hope. It is a triumph of wisdom of a fantasy. Love is not about hope. Love is not about daydreaming. Love is not about hope. Love is not about daydreaming. Love is not about fantasy. Love is not about imagination. Love is not about magic and enchantment. None of these things have anything to do with love, and many of them negate it and vitiate it and undermine it. Love is not about hope because hope is often divorced from reality. Hope is the statement, I resent and reject reality as it is, I wish it were different. Hope is counterfactual. Love is always about reality, always embedded in it. It reifies factuality. It is factual. And so love is the triumph of long experience, arduous, difficult as it is, over hope. Love is about developing habits. Your loved one becomes an acquired habit in a good sense of the world. Something that regulates your life, something that provides you, provides it with meaning and purpose and direction in goal, but not exclusively so. Your loved one becomes a habit that helps you to self-soothe and self-comfort and self- elevate and develop and grow, but it never monopolizes you. It never ever conquers you.
The concept of conquest or monopoly or exclusivity, these concepts are detrimental to love. They destroy it.
So love is a habit and it is the experience of habituation that makes love so strong and powerful and resilient that affords it with a fortitude, impermeability, invincibility and vulnerability and strength that are, and should it forever be associated with love.
Love is about passing tests. The loved ones put each other to the test time and again.
Mostly, inadvertently, this is not intentional, this is not malevolent, these tests. These tests are what we call life.
And throughout life, we put each other to the test. And we pass these tests.
The more tests we pass, the more we are forgiven, for example, the more we are understood, the more we are accepted, within boundaries, within strict rules of conduct. The more tests we pass, the more the love between us is cemented and stronger than ever.
So love is the residue and the consequence of passing tests, time and again, which is just another name, another way to describe experience. Love is the experience of life.
Friendship is about all these things. It's about passing tests. It's about habits. It's about experience.
And so people who love each other are also each other's friends.
You can't be doubtful about your loved one. You can't of course be hostile to your loved one. You can't be too critical of your loved one because then it is not love.
You must be your loved one's friend. Friendship is a critical component of love.
And so as time passes, if you have survived the tests, if you have withstood the slings and arrows of time, if you have learned to delve deeper into your loved one and to get acquainted and knowledgeable and familiar with her essence, then over time love becomes more profound.
You can't dislodge it. you can't reverse it, you can't truly undermine it.
Challenges are good. Challenges induce growth. Even losses are good. Losses are the engine of development.
But love itself grows deeper with time until it becomes profound.
We see couples 40 years together, 50 years together, their love has been transmuted and transformed by time itself.
Time endows love with a flavor and with characteristics and attributes that only time can endow with and bestow.
And so love is the outcome of time. And time is the determinant of experience.
And experience is about passing the tests of life.
And so there's a lot of wisdom involved, accruing over the decades, over years the wisdom of togetherness the wisdom of being the wisdom of becoming the wisdom of separateness within the couple the wisdom of bringing the world into the couple into the dyad without threatening it and destroying it.
This all requires fine-tuning and calibration and sagacity and perspicacity, the elements of wisdom.
And so love is not about fantasy, love is about reality. Love is not about daydreaming. Love is about life.
Love is not pleasant. Love is demanding and onerous and honorary.
Love is not about suspending disbelief or your judgment or ignoring red signs, red alerts or, you know, being in a state of trance or hypnosis. That's not love, because all these are the exact opposites of wisdom, and there is no love without wisdom.
What kind of wisdom? Not the wisdom that you find in books, or in academia. The wisdom that you find in the wrinkles and the eyes of the old.
When you look into the eyes of someone 80 years old, when you contemplate the wrinkles of a 90 year old, this is the wisdom of the ages.
And so love is with us and has been with us since time immemorial. And like fine wine, it grows better with time.
Time doesn't have a deleterious effect on love.
There's no entropy in love. Love does not deteriorate or decay or decompose with time.
And if it does, it hasn't been love to start with.