Loving and Pretending
If you want love in your life, you’ve got to be loving. Love is ever working and never ceases. It doesn’t sit back and take a break. It says, ‘Love, love and go on loving.’ Anyone who is loving and wants to keep love alive must acknowledge love - every day. The main reason people’s love becomes habitual is that they do not acknowledge their love of each other. So it starts to harden, and set and petrify. This world kills love.
Curiosity kills love. A lot of love is based on a desire to know the other person. As soon as the knowledge is complete, no more love. How long does it take to know the person’s body? Their emotions? They are not deep in most people. Then the resentments come and the arguments start. And on goes the armour-plate; 'Don’t come in here. This is a protected area’. Each recognises the protected area of the other. And so love dies.
If your love has become habitual, and you don’t see loving actions in your partner anymore, you won’t acknowledge love. If you don’t see it, if you don’t recognise love, it means the love is not in you anymore. There might be a loving action, but you aren’t seeing it. Your ability to love is dying.
The world makes such demands on us that to really love we have to be very strong and not give in. To really love is to refuse the demand for a pretence of love.
If you’re going to really love you’ll have to do it right across the board. The whole family has to know where you stand and know that you will not give in to the demand for a pretend love. Can you communicate the truth of that one or will you compromise with it? Will you be dishonest? Then you will not be truly loving. Well, everyone compromises until they reach the wonderful freedom of no longer giving in to anyone’s demands.
Love is not kindness. Everyone must love according to their love and if you find that what you do is kind, then keep loving and keep being kind. But if you would understand the tremendous responsibility of love, you must understand that there is a higher and higher and higher love.
The highest form of love I can demonstrate is life itself. We love life. Is there a higher love than life itself? And yet life does horrible things. The love that grows the trees and brings a baby into this world will kill the child before the mother’s eyes, knock it down with a car, cut its head off with a sword … It’s called life.
Love kills? What am I talking about? Is this nonsense or is it wisdom? Sometimes love, like life, is very, very cruel.
Understand the truth of life. There is a virtue in the life that kills the child. There is a virtue in you being the truth, so you can say, like life, 'This little one’s life must end. This mother must know pain, for the inscrutable reasons of life. This is the fact.’ Understand that there is no virtue in the pain, except that it makes us understand life. That is what pain is about.
So sometimes we might have to say, 'I cannot go on with this pretence of love as kindness any longer.’ When you love enough you can say 'I cannot stand the pretence anymore. And in those moments we are terribly strong. We know what we want. It matters not how much it hurts, because it is right.
It often happens that a man or woman loves someone who continually imposes on him or her … Say it’s a woman and the man takes her for granted. She loves him, has devoted herself to him and been terribly misused. One day she suddenly says, 'Enough. No more. I’m leaving you.’ And he says, 'Why? What for?’ - 'Because you haven’t loved me.’ - 'Of course I love you!’ (He hasn’t been acknowledging his love). And she says, 'No, there’s not enough love.’ And though she loves him, she leaves him weeping. The woman has been straight and right. The man, If he has any love in him at all, will go inside himself, through the pain, and say, 'My God, I love her!’ For in that moment of parting we know that we truly love.
In a loving relationship you stay and stay. Love usually stays and serves. Love is untiring. But it does not endlessly give in to demand. The time comes when love says, 'Enough. It is done.’ This is not said out of habit or with blaming. The simple truth is: It’s over. It is finished. And you go without holding on to the other person inside yourself. Then it’s no good feeling sorry tomorrow. Love is sure of itself. It knows itself. That is its authority. There may be anguish in breaking attachments but there can be no lamentation - or it was not love that walked away, but only an attitude, a habit.
Are you prepared to go on accepting the pretence of love? What will you teach the children? Will you indulge them with loving kindness? Will the child expect a birthday present? Presents habitually given will mean that the child has expectations. But life gives no presents and takes everything away. So the child or adult will get unhappy because that loving kindness has prepared a future suffering. Our loving must be honest and straight. 'You get a present sometimes, but I love you all the time.’ It’s the same at Christmas. Everyone has to be kind. 'Happy Christmas!’ Everyone has a big hug. And for the next 364 days they’re hurting each other. Christ stands for every day, is born every day - or has no birth. To be a Christian is 'to love one another as I have loved you’ … Love every day. It is no good just being a follower, settling for ceremonies and rituals. Be the Christ inside yourself.
All I am demonstrating is the pretence. All you have to do is see it. I am not telling you what to do in your personal lives. That would not be loving. All I say is look at the areas of life I am reflecting to you. That is enough. And have no assumptions. 'I will not accept anything that anyone tells me until I expose it to the scrutiny of my own authentic being, my own intelligence.’
Talking to you with love, as I am, I am acknowledging love all the time. By acknowledging love, I am love. I am not dependent on your love. As long as I love, I know love. And if you know love, then love cannot go away. People can walk away but there will always be someone there with you, because love has to have a mirror of itself. Like now: love is here. I am talking to the part of you that loves life and loves the truth.
Edited extracts from a talk at Trinity College, Oxford, 27 October 1981
Vices and Virtues