time. The very need to be fully requited may be to turn from the
possibilities of love itself. Men and women have always had
difficulty with the way a love returned hardly ever resembles a love
given, but unrequited love may be the form that love mostly takes;
for what affection is ever returned over time in the same measure
or quality with which it is given? … And whom could we know so
well and so intimately through all the twists and turns of a given
life that we could show them exactly, the continuous and
appropriate form of affection they need?
The great discipline seems to be to give up wanting to control the
manner in which we are requited, and to forgo the natural
disappointment that flows from expecting an exact and measured
reciprocation.
We seem to have been born into a world where love, except for
brilliant, exceptional moments, seems to exist from one side only,
ours — and that may be the difficulty and the revelation and the
gift — to see love as the ultimate letting go and through the
doorway of that affection, make the most difficult sacrifice of all,
giving away the very thing we want to hold forever.
Love may be sanctified and ennobled by its commitment to the
unconditional horizon of perfection, but what makes love real
in the human world seems to be our moving, struggling conversation
with that wanted horizon rather than any possibility of arrival. The
hope for, or the declaration of a purely spiritual, unconditional love
is more often a coded desire for immunity and safety, an attempt
to forgo the trials of vulnerability, powerlessness and the exquisite
pain to which we apprentice ourselves in a relationship,
a marriage, in raising children, in a work we love and desire.
The hope for unconditional love is the hope for a different life than
the one we have been given. Love is the conversation between
possible, searing disappointment and a profoundly imagined sense
of arrival and fulfillment; how we shape that conversation is the
touchstone of our ability to love in the real inhabited world. The
true signature and perhaps even the miracle of human love is
helplessness, and all the more miraculous because it is a
helplessness which we wittingly or unwittingly choose; in our love
of a child, a partner, a work, or a road we have to take against the
odds.
David Whyte
Art: Wylie Beckert
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