I’ve written previously about Kevin Kelly’s “68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice.” I was thinking again this morning about what my advice would be to younger people based on my own 67 years’ worth of lessons learned. The one I came up with this time is understanding what love is as a practice.
We’re all well acquainted with what love is as an ideal. Novels, movies and fairy tales all serve up an idealized representation of love, from “meet cute” to “happily ever after.” Millions of people have had the unfortunate experience of observing the extent to which their own relationships fall short of the archetype.
And all of us could offer any number of definitions of love as a concept. For example, love is devotion. Love is selflessness. Love is someone else being more important to you than you are to yourself. And so on, and so on.
And we’re equally well-acquainted with love as a feeling. It’s that warm, fluttery, happy sensation we get when we’re with someone we love, right?
Unfortunately, none of those ways of understanding love gives us access to having a loving relationship. If anything, they get in the way.
Which brings us to love as a practice, or put another way, what people are actually doing when love is present. What is love in real life?
Love as a practice is accepting someone exactly the way they are and exactly the way they’re not — not trying to change them, not resisting the way they are or resenting them for being that way, just accepting them. Observe carefully when you see love in action, and that’s what you’ll see.
I learned to think about love this way when I led a seminar on relationships for Landmark Education. A discussion of what love is as a practice was part of the first of the seminar’s ten sessions, and the seminar leader’s manual noted that I should be prepared to hear about extraordinary things happening in some participants’ relationships after that first session.
Sure enough, at the second session a participant shared about a transformation in his relationship with his wife of 40 years. He had decided on his way home from the first session to try accepting his wife just the way she was and just the way she wasn’t. The result was nothing short of miraculous. He reported having an entirely new relationship. Love was present to a degree it hadn’t been in decades.
Of course, implementing this advice requires giving something up. It requires giving up our self-righteousness, our standards and ideals. It requires being generous. But the payoff is huge. The payoff is love. The only question we need to ask ourselves is, what is love worth?
Paul, this is lovely.
Paul, you’ve hit this right on the mark. The practice of love really is acceptance of your beloved exactly as he or she is. One of the greatest gifts I have ever been given is the one I received from my wife at the very beginning of our relationship: she accepted me just as I was; I just had to “show up.” I did not have to pretend to be anyone else or constantly strive to show my “best” side. She loved me and loves me just the way I am. I learned to do the same thing. It’s extraordinary when it happens.