Love is a strong swimmer

Recently on Facebook, a friend posted a mini review of his book that appeared in the New York Times. In the review, he’s quoted on his definition of a few things, one of which is (romantic) love. Of love, he says, more or less, it does not correspond to the image you have in your head of the beloved. Rather, it’s something completely unexpected that “comes from the world.”

Which means you’re bound to be disappointed (because it does not match your fantasy) or elated (because it exceeds your hopes and dreams). Luckily for him, he’s elated.

A day earlier, one of my brother’s friends, a man I have not seen since I had a teen crush, wrote me an email saying that I think about relationships “too much.” He was responding to my email in which I bemoaned my unhappy entanglements with love. He was not wrong; I think almost exclusively about relationships (although, could someone please quantify “too much” for me?). I look around and wonder how others do it – love each other through adversity, stay together, have children, have fights and still find a way to be tender, respectful, and compassionate through it all.

For a year now, I have hesitated writing this blog because the themes seemed to always lean towards my sadness, mostly about the death of my brother, Andy. Which is why my blog posts mostly dried up. There was a layer of sadness to everything and it felt like too much exposure.

What does this have to do with romantic relationships and, perhaps more importantly, with love of all stripes? Well, in my case, I worried that my sadness was keeping me from love. When a happy person entered my realm, I feared my mourning would be too much for them, so I would try to hide it at first. But sadness is like a pool, splashing over the edges as soon as someone jumps in. Nevertheless, it's absurd to believe that ALL the water will leave the pool when someone cannonballs into your world; and just as absurd to believe that love will drown in the face of sadness. Love, in fact, is a gold-medal swimmer.

The problem was not love, it was happiness. Other people’s.

I love it when my rickety theories are supported by award-winning radio shows like, say, Ideas, one of my favourite CBC programs. I encourage all my dear readers to give “Say no to happiness” a listen. In it, various guest speakers – writers, thinkers, and other intrepid explorers of the human condition – offer such provocative and profound insights into why happiness should not be your life’s pursuit that it makes you never want to be happy again – at least not in a saccharine-y, Dr. Phil-y, or any other unconscious way of defining happiness.

These CBC thinkers discuss what I call “the mistake of happiness” in no uncertain terms. (For those of you who need happiness defined, the CBC folks do take a few stabs at definitions, but I don’t have space here, so insert whatever definition you have and then see how it measures up to my theories).

What the CBC speakers say, in short, is that happiness is not necessarily a state that can deepen you.

They go on to say that many happy people are not necessarily spiritual, mindful, creative, or even nice. In fact, insist the CBC speakers, the pursuit of happiness is … wait for it . . . “shallow”! The whole notion of “be positive” not only trivializes how complicated our world is, but also how complicated the full range of human emotions is. Having a full spectrum of emotions is what makes us able to react and adapt appropriately to life’s myriad circumstances. Happiness can be the wrong response in many cases, while sadness can be the right psychological state vis-a-vis a particular situation, like, say, death.

The Buddha himself identified suffering as intrinsic to human existence, not happiness. But the point of recognizing that life is suffering is not to curl up into a ball and give up. As one of the CBC speakers points out, the suffering we experience is something we can use. How? Well, it opens us up to pain, a state we should honour because it enables us to nurture compassion for our fellow humans who also struggle. Everyone struggles, even happy people, even if it’s over a decision about what to eat for lunch.

The CBCers go on to say that the trouble with happiness is that it does not propel us forward in our development. If we are constantly in a state of placidity due to happiness, nothing will affect us deeply – not the horrors in the world, or our friend’s scraped knee, or, worse, not even our own (buried) suffering – and, as a result, we will not deepen ourselves.

If our philosophy of life does not include life’s tragedies, it is, by definition, “shallow and meaningless,” and, as a shallow person, we are essentially a danger to ourselves and others. Why? Because when we fear someone else’s sadness will thwart our happiness, we become not only resentful, hostile, and critical, but also cruel (a CBC speaker really said this, I’m not making it up!). What does that look like? Well, anything from avoidance to sarcasm to platitudes such as, "be positive!" These responses are not about the sad person at all. They are about the happy person dissociating.

In my own experience, nothing increases one’s sense of isolation and sadness more than being with a person who is essentially incapable of seeing your pain. Whether it’s by choice or as a result of simply never having had experiences that deepened them enough to become sensitive, it’s you who will suffer . . . unless, of course, you decide to see the happy person through your own eyes of compassion because, after all, by distancing themselves from pain – theirs or yours – the happy person is losing out on an opportunity to connect more deeply with themselves and others, and, thus, is actually the person in a sad state of affairs . . . (more on that in a minute).

I’ve been having a debate with someone about the definition of romantic love. According to my debating partner, love is about getting your needs met. It’s about finding a partner with similar interests to your own so that you can do the same things, like lawn bowling. But, says opponent, if you find that over time you develop an affection for the slow, subtleties of curling while your partner has a sudden yen to dig for buried treasure, then your love will fail and it’s probably better to jettison the whole enterprise. Because, according to my debating partner, one’s own happiness – i.e. I want to do what I want and I want you to do what I want – is paramount (where love is in all this is a mystery to me.)

I argued back that love is not about meeting your needs so much as seeing the needs of others (and, if you can, meeting them), and that happiness defined as two people sweeping the same ice might be missing the point. You might find greater happiness putting your broom down and helping your partner dig deep for that treasure. Together, you might discover something new and terrifying and beautiful. Or you may just feel good having done something outside your comfort zone and inside someone else's.

Your partner may like that so much, they may offer to curl with you! Plus, you may actually see your partner for the first time instead of your own image mirrored in ice.

Early on in this love debate, my worthy opponent conceded to my definition of love, but only insofar as serving others is just another form having your own needs met if what turns your crank is serving others. I could not argue with that. But something about it felt off. I couldn’t really explain what until I remembered an experience that illuminated the difference for me.

In the ninth month of dating a man in Montreal a few years ago, there were two weeks in which he needed me. During the first week, he had laser-eye surgery, which left him incapacitated. It happened to be the same two-week period he had custody of his three-year-old son. So, I moved in to my guy’s apartment and took care of them both. In the second week, his son became sick with flu, upping the ante on the care giving. During those two weeks, I missed the window for the delivery of a stove, which may sound inconsequential, but I’d been without one for three months. I also was not able to go out for a run because I could not leave my boyfriend to care for his son alone. I had to take the boy with me on all my errands.

Was it convenient? No. It disrupted all my routines. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t long to go to a café or that I had Mother Theresa’s heart of selfless thought. I was annoyed aplenty. But my boyfriend didn’t have a choice. And that softened my annoyance. I had to stretch myself beyond my comfort zone, and, like any exercise, it was good for me. It made me less selfish. I believe I fell in love with my guy for the first time during those two weeks because I saw him rather than my own needs. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince says in the self-titled book, you don’t love something because it’s beautiful or original or even because it loves you back, you love what you have cared for.

At the end of the two weeks I went home, and within a day I became so ill I could not get out of bed. When I phoned my boyfriend to tell him, he said, “Well, what do you want me to do?”

I don’t think there is a question I hate more, unless it’s “Well, what do you want me to say?” Talk about a total lack of good will, kindness, and compassion. I’d rather the person just say, “I’ve checked out, babe. Your need is cramping my style.” At least that would be honest and make them responsible for their own disability.

If it’s not evident that you should help a sick person even though you may have a curling match on TV or if you have fallen out of love, then you are not someone who knows how to love, because love does not ask, “what’s in it for me?” It simply goes to the grocery store, picks up ingredients for soup, makes the soup, and delivers it to the doorstep of the sick person -- friend or foe.

The reason my soon-to-be-ex boyfriend did not do the above is because he thought love should bring happiness, and that happiness did not involve caring for someone when he had shit to do. Whose definition of love that is, I don’t know, but a lot of people share it. And it’s lethal.

The CBC speakers have a great deal to say about how this kind of pursuit of happiness is anathema to love. They argue that valuing someone means opening yourself up to risk of deep hurt and sorrow (and probably a lot of inconvenience). You can’t really do that unless you extend yourself beyond you own needs. They go on to say that to make a relationship truly profound, you have to put it all on the line. And when you don’t, you essentially “shrink in cowardess” to the demands human existence place on us. (How many ex’s have you wanted to say that to?)

To me, love looks like this:

A few weekss ago, a friend said: “Liz, you've had two major sucker punches in a short space of time. Instead of trying to fit yourself into someone else’s idea of how you should be right now, just let yourself mourn. It might take a week, it might take until you’re sixty. But loving yourself means not beating yourself up for how you feel or trying to rush the mourning process. You don’t owe anyone your happiness. And we who love you want you to be exactly where you are and will love you through it.”

And with this permission to be sad for as long as it takes me to heal, I instantly felt less sad. How simple.

It had the opposite effect of “be positive,” which only dismisses my immediate experience and deepens my sadness because it’s like telling a person’s broken leg to “be unbroken already!” Healing a leg (and a heart) takes time – and you are not unlovable during that healing process.

But in the same way you can’t hurry up the healing of a broken leg to meet your friend’s curling needs, you can’t make a “happy” person show compassion, especially if they fear sadness like a disease. Compassion cannot be demanded or manufactured. But you can show compassion towards this “happy” person who will likely only ever skip across the surface of relationships, never going deep enough to connect, because they are afraid to love all of what life is, all of what being human is, in themselves and others. What a tragic loss. Be sad for them.

One of the CBC speakers finished the program with this thought: as human beings, we are not islands. We are social creatures programmed to respond to others. As conscious beings, the purpose of life is not the pursuit of our own happiness, but to “transcend [our] mortal limitations,” in order to see and, hopefully, to help others (what I call extending oneself).

“As a goal that justifies suffering,” the speaker adds, “it’s unbeatable, because what it does is broaden and deepen your life in a manner that you might compare elevator music to a Beethoven symphony.”

And THAT, my friends, is the difference between meeting your needs vs. meeting the needs of others. The former, like elevator music, will not challenge you, and thus it will not change you. While the latter -- a veritable symphony of experiences -- will bring a kind of something-beyond-happiness that is intrinsic to the act of listening, engaging, and giving. It’s not about service for the sake of appearing as the good congregate repeating the right hymns on Sunday, because that’s still about you getting into your own heaven. It’s about being moved because you have opened your eyes to see someone else in all their glory -- their joys and their pains. Not just the bits and pieces that suit your needs.

When I ask my friends what makes their long-lived romantic relationships work, it’s never about their shared interests (which make up only 10% of their lives together, and which have, of course, changed over time). Rather, it’s about what my therapist used to call “getting interested.” Whenever I would come up against a problem in a relationship, she would say, “get interested,” meaning don’t see the problem as a reason to flee (because you think your partner is not the right fit, which is about shopping, not about relating and growing). See it as an opportunity to inquire into why your partner is doing what they are doing. Maybe you could learn something about them. Getting interested does not come with judgment. It's an open-ended question mark that seeks to learn something about the beloved instead of making assumptions because you long to be right and get on with your happiness. What is going on for them? My friends don’t expect their relationships to be about shared interests, unless by interests one means getting interested in getting to know the other person unconditionally.

One Buddhist therapist said the best way to love your partner is to look at them every day and ask, “who are you?” And to make space for who they actually are, rather than to demand they be an expert ice sweeper so that you can count on them for your game. When you can see them, you will find that you are moved. Being moved by someone is the very definition of love (even if you are not "in love"). And in the face of that kind of transcendent love, you won’t have the ability to be unkind, sarcastic, disinterested, or self serving. You will just feel compelled to be present, engaged, wondering how they feel, and jonesing to be of service – whether it’s to make the beloved a mocha, listen to their dreams without judgment, or to hug away their tears. That is love.

I used to warn new friends and lovers that I suffer from depression or chronic sadness. But now I’m starting to think that I suffer from being human. Sad spells can take years, but being loved through them can shorten the healing process considerably. Also, let's be honest here, even long sad spells do not mean the "sad" person is incapable of being joyful as well. No one is ever only one thing. Even the happy people, even if they don't know when they are sad.

Whether I learn to cultivate enough compassion for my own suffering, as well as for the suffering of my fellow humans – both those who suffer from sadness, as well as those who suffer from happiness – I am ready for the challenge. Given the choice, I will take Beethoven’s richly differentiated music – the major and minor chords – over the thin, vampire tones of elevator music, which, if you think about it, only plays in small, airless spaces during the most unscenic ride there is.