Introduction

A night full of talking that hurts,
My worst held-back secrets:
Everything has to do with loving and
not loving.
—Rumi

The words “I love you,” spoken in moments of genuine appreciation, wonder, or caring, arise from something perfectly pure within us—the capacity to open ourselves and say yes without reserve. Such moments of pure openheartedness bring us as close to natural perfection as we can come in this life. The warm and radiant yes of the heart is perfect, like the sun, in bringing all things to life and nourishing all that is truly human.

Yet oddly enough, even though we may have glimpses of a pure, bright love dwelling within the human heart, it’s hard to find it fully embodied in the world around us, especially where it matters most—in our relationships with other people. Indeed, for many people today, risking themselves in a love relationship has become a frightening proposition, a near-certain prescription for overwhelming pain or emotional devastation. Scratch the surface of our sex-and-romance-crazed culture and you find a sense of disillusionment in many people where they feel, as one pop song puts it, that “love stinks.” Or, as a young woman in one of my workshops expressed it: “If love is so great, why are relationships so impossible? Don’t tell me I need to open my heart any more. My heart is already too open, and I don’t want to keep getting hurt.”

So right alongside the truth of love’s perfection, there stands another, more difficult truth—the flawed, tangled web of human relationship, which gives rise to tremendous frustration, sorrow, and anger everywhere we look. One minute you’re in touch with the love in your heart—you feel open, caring, and connected. And then the next minute, before you know it, you and your loved one have become embroiled in a conflict or misunderstanding that leads to shutting down or behaving in a heartless way.

Thus even when our love is genuine and real, something often seems to block its full and perfect expression in relationships. “I love you, but I can’t live with you” is the classic statement of this painful gap between the pure love in our heart and the difficult relationships we inhabit. This disparity presents a maddening riddle, which each of us must “solve or be torn to bits,” as D. H. Lawrence suggested.

This riddle shows up in many different guises. Even though love forever arises anew, most of us walk around feeling deprived of it, as if starving in a land of plenty. And while love can bring tremendous joy, our love life often brings our greatest suffering. Even though there is nothing as simple and straightforward as the warmth of the heart, still, “for one human being to love another, this is the most difficult of all our tasks,” as the poet Rilke wrote. And while in one sense love conquers all, war nonetheless remains the governing force in world affairs.

The sense of loneliness and deprivation afflicting many people’s lives is not because love is in short supply. For you can find love everywhere you look, in one form or another. Every smile and most of the conversations and glances you exchange with the people you encounter every day contain at least a few grains of love, in the form of interest, appreciation, consideration, warmth, or kindness. Add up all the interchanges you have with others every day and you will see that your life is sustained by a flow of interconnectedness, which is the play of love at work. “There is no force in the world but love,” as Rilke writes.

Yet if love is the greatest power on earth, the force that sustains human life—which in some sense it certainly is—why hasn’t love’s radiant warmth been able to banish the darkness engulfing the world, and transform and uplift this earth? Why is it so hard for love to permeate the dense fabric of human relationships? If love is our greatest source of happiness and joy, why is it so hard to open to it fully and let it govern our lives? What is the problem?

These questions took on particular urgency for me soon after September 11, 2001, when the world was once again plunging into war. As the bombs rained down on Afghanistan in retaliation for the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the world felt especially fragile to me, and perilously close to collapsing into hatred and violence. After America’s political leaders embarked on what appeared to be a war without end, I felt an imperative to take a fresh look at why it’s so hard for what is best in the human being—the warmth and goodness of the heart—to take hold in this world.

I have previously written two books on conscious relationship—Journey of the Heart and Love and Awakening—that show how to embrace and work with the challenges of relationship as opportunities for personal transformation and spiritual awakening. This book takes a different tack. It focuses on the root source of all relational problems, “the mother of all relationship issues”—our wounded relationship to love itself.

The Mood of Unlove

There are hundreds of books on the market that offer relationship fixes in one form or another. Some of these techniques can be quite helpful. Yet at some point, most technical fixes turn out to be patches that fall off, for they fail to address what lies at the root of all interpersonal conflict and misunderstanding—whether between marital partners, family members, friends, fellow workers, or different ethnic groups in the world at large. All the most intractable problems in human relationships can be traced back to what I call the mood of unlove—a deep-seated suspicion most of us harbor within ourselves that we cannot be loved, or that we are not truly lovable, just for who we are. This basic insecurity makes it hard to trust in ourselves, in other people, or in life itself.

Not knowing, in our blood and bones, that we are truly loved or lovable undermines our capacity to give and receive love freely. This is the core wound that generates interpersonal conflict and a whole range of familiar relationship tangles. Difficulty trusting, fear of being misused or rejected, harboring jealousy and vindictiveness, defensively stonewalling, having to argue and prove we’re right, feeling easily hurt or offended and blaming others for our pain—these are just a few of the ways that our insecurity about being loved or lovable shows up.

The mood of unlove often shows up in the form of sudden emotional flare-ups in reaction to any hint of being slighted or badly treated. It’s as though a reservoir of distrust and resentment were ready and waiting to be released, which the tiniest incident can trigger. Even caring and compassionate people often carry within them a fair share of unlove and righteous grievance, which can suddenly erupt under certain circumstances. For some couples these explosions happen early on, blowing a budding relationship apart in their first few encounters. For others, the mood of unlove might not wreak its havoc until well into a seemingly happy marriage, when one or both partners suddenly wake up one day and realize they don’t feel truly seen or known. It’s not uncommon for long-term spouses to say something like, “I know my husband loves me, but somehow I don’t feel loved.”

Sometimes the mood of unlove shows up in the form of endless bickering and petty irritation, as though both partners were continually looking for reasons to grumble, “Why don’t you love me better?” For example, one couple I worked with described the following incident that led to a weeklong estrangement. The woman had just made her husband tea when he became upset with her for putting milk in it: “Haven’t I told you before that I don’t want you putting milk in my tea for me, that I like to let it steep for a long time first?” The only way to understand how something so trivial could trigger a major conflict is through recognizing what her action signifies for him: In his eyes, she has shown once again that she is not attuned to him and his needs—like all the other women in his life, starting with his mother. And for her, when even making him tea becomes an occasion for blame and resentment, this shows, once again, that no matter what she does, she can never win his love. Lurking in the background of this petty incident is the age-old pain of feeling uncared for and unappreciated, which both partners are reenacting once again.

As a practicing psychotherapist, I have been intrigued by the tenacity and intransigence of the mood of unlove, which can live on in the psyche in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary (even when people in our lives do love us) or in spite of many years of psychotherapy or spiritual practice. What’s worse, the mood of unlove has the power to repel, belittle, or sabotage whatever love is there. Somehow the love that’s available always seems to fall short—it’s not sufficient, not good enough, or not the right kind. Somehow it fails to convince us that we are truly loved or lovable. In this way the mood of unlove—as an expectation that we won’t or can’t be fully embraced or accepted—makes us impervious to letting in the love that might actually free us from its grip.

As a result, “You have two choices in life: You can stay single and be miserable or get married and wish you were dead," as H. L. Mencken wrote with a flourish of wry, black humor. Reciting this line atrelationship workshops always evokes peals of laughter as people feel the relief of naming this basic human dilemma. When under the spell of the mood of unlove, living alone is miserable because we feel bereft or abandoned. And yet marrying is no cure for this misery, since living with someone every day can further intensify the sense of unlove and make it feel even more hellish.

How then can brokenhearted people like ourselves heal this woundedness around love that has been passed down through the generations, and set ourselves free from the strife that dominates our world? This is the most crucial issue of human life, both personally and collectively. It is also the central focus of this book.

The Nature and Significance of Love

I would define love very simply: as a potent blend of openness and warmth, which allows us to make real contact, to take delight in and appreciate, and to be at one with—ourselves, others, and life itself. Openness—the heart’s pure, unconditional yes—is love’s essence. And warmth is love’s basic expression, arising as a natural extension of this yes—the desire to reach out and touch, connect with, and nourish what we love. If love’s openness is like the clear, cloudless sky, its warmth is like the sunlight streaming through that sky, emitting a rainbowlike spectrum of colors: passion, joy, contact, communion, kindness, caring, understanding, service, dedication, and devotion, to name just a few.

According to the saints and mystics, love is the very fabric of what we are; we are fashioned out of its warmth and openness. We don’t have to be great sages to recognize this. All we need to do is take an honest look at what makes our life worthwhile. When the presence of love is alive and moving in us, there is no doubt that our life is on target and meaningful, regardless of our outer circumstances. We feel that we’re in touch, connected with something larger than our small self. This lifts the burden of isolation and alienation off our shoulders, filling us with peace and well-being. But when the presence of love is absent, something often feels sad, not quite right; something seems to be missing, and it’s hard to find much joy, even in the midst of favorable circumstances. We easily fall prey to meaninglessness, anxiety, or despair.