| The experience of loving unilateral. It asks no response, nor does it
demand the other to be deserving. Any and every human being deserves love. It is not
earned; one deserves it. So every human being offers us the opportunity of loving them.
The loving rewards, not the being loved. Being made in the image of God, each of us
deserves love. Our loving is our striving toward godliness. It is our privilege, not our
duty. Love has no rewards beyond the experience of it, nor does it require any. "I love you" is most deeply a feeling, then an activity, and least of all, words. As words, it is often used to stop loving, or reassure, or push away. When the feeling forms the words, the words are not merely heard, but are seen and touched. As a feeling, it brings the loved into being and the lover to the experience of another being. Alone, each is beautiful; experienced together, they create. The feeling of love arises out of your person, unreasonably and wonderfully thrusting itself on, and contagiously evoking response in the other. When felt unreservedly without hesitance, shame, or fear, the loved has no choice but to love. The slightest hesitance or most meager reservation in loving can undo. If the love feeling in you does not wake a love response, do no chastise the other, but look into your own heart to find wherein your loving lacks fullness or is crippled by your hesitance. Many good and bad feelings are mistaken for love. Caring for, forgiveness of, tolerance of, infatuation with, dependence on, feeling close to, being friendly with, going to, accepting from, sacrificing to, being excited by, understanding of, and countless others. These feelings are not only not love, they are seldom part of loving. They are part of living with, but not loving of. "I love you" means something very special and very concrete. It means that I surround you with the feeling that allows you -- perhaps even requires you -- to be everything you really are as a human being at that moment. When my love is fullest, you are most fully you. You may be good, or bad, or both; tender, or angry, or both; but you are you, which is the very most I could ever ask or expect. And so I experience you in all your beauty and all your ugliness. But you, not what I expect, or want, or what you feel you should be, or were fashioned to be, but really you. I do not love you for what you are. My love of you enables you to be what you are. Love shatters roles and illuminates persons. The acquired masks are discarded, and we face each other as we are -- really and usually wonderfully. Because being loved allows the other to be what he or she really is, it is much easier to know when you are loved than it is to know when you are loving. The affirmation of your love is in the other person's being; the confirmation of being loved lies in your experience of being yourself. This you can most readily and reliably know. Since it is easier to know when you are loved than when you are loving, the most serious personal distortions of human experience lie in the loving, not the loved experience. Most psychiatric problems arise out of confusion of loving; mistakes about being loved are rare, if they occure at all.
from "The Art of Intimacy", Personal Spaces ... Love, Intimacy, and Closeness |