The struggle between loving and wanting to be loved is delicate and sometimes confusing but ultimately rife with beautiful life lessons.  On the one hand, I’ve spent the past few years focusing on being a more loving person (trying), on putting my attention on the well being of others (without being fake about it), trying to remember that “it’s not all about me” (without being a martyr), and truly, sincerely, genuinely, authentically care.  I want to care.  I want to care for the right reasons.  I want to want nothing more than the well being and healing of those around me, and slowly, I’ve been learning.  It’s a growth process, a self-imposed training program designed to cultivate loving kindness and compassion, the kind that does actual good, not the self-aggrandizing kind that makes you feel like a superior, spiritually advanced person.

I’ve had plenty of opportunities to make the choice.  Again and again, I’ve been presented with a fork in the road.  In these instances, the well being of someone I care about is pitted against my own desires for attention and fondness, and I can choose to withdraw with my bruised ego or stay and offer the comfort or caring that person needs.  Always the choice is extremely hard.  I’m up against a most primitive, intense survival drive, the drive to feel like I matter, to feel special to others.  Going against that current feels like walking to my death.  And, it is a death of sorts, no doubt about it.  But every time I choose to stay and care and set aside my own ego, I enter the fire, my wounded self image is incinerated, and I come out on the other side with a glowing star in my heart, and feeling nothing but tenderness.  Luminosity.

Nevertheless, I’ve continued to struggle with a need to feel like I matter, to be special and have my worth affirmed.  Despite the joy I get from caring, a part of me still worries about spending my life in loneliness, and it seems like the only way to prevent that is to capture the affections of someone.  And I use the word “capture” with deliberation.  There is a sense of taking, trying to establish some secure arrangement whereby my emotional needs for presence and affection will be met for a long while.

Then I watch as people enter new relationships, or leave them, and I notice how all of their attention is on their own experience, and it starts to seem very silly.  They fixate on what they are getting, on how they’ve been beheld, on how they’ve been nurtured or injured, on where they stand.  Everything about themselves.  If you are in a relationship with someone, should it not be about that other person?  “About,” as in, the content of your thoughts and the focus of your attention would be their experience and not just your own?  And, you wouldn’t be concerning yourself with their experience simply as an indirect way of orchestrating your own experience?  What is the point of being “with” someone if that person’s experience does not enter your consciousness purely, for it’s own sake, unfiltered by your own perspective and needs?

Something slightly scary about all that, because it gives the impression that you will give yourself away and get nothing in return, which is how everything looks through the lens of control and power, not love.  I guess what I’m realizing is that love should probably be about love, and the whole bit about ensuring that your needs are met is something else, and it doesn’t produce lasting fulfillment anyway, so I find that I just want to cut to the chase and love.

All of this has been sinking in.  As it has settled more deeply into my world view, I thought about a time when I was “in love” and the other person was not.  I took it very hard.  Why?  Because I took it to mean that I didn’t matter.  And why was that hard?  Because I had turned my attention towards my own emotional needs, my own experience and perspective.  I was making it “all about me.”

But what does it mean for someone to be “in love” with you, when seen through the lens of love instead of control?  Imagine someone telling you that they are “in love” with you or not in love.  You can ask yourself, “What does this mean for me?” or you can ask yourself, “What does this mean for them?”  What is that experience like for them?  What is it like to need to tell someone that you don’t feel certain things for them?  What is it like to find yourself in that situation, forced to acknowledge the truth of your own feelings and communicate that to someone you care about, to watch them cry and grieve and know you can’t do anything to help?  It’s horrible.  I’ve watched people beat themselves up for years, because they couldn’t be what someone else wanted in them.

I have often had the fantasy of someone falling in love with me, a common one to be sure.  In my fantasy, the whole scenario is fundamentally “about me,” and that never actually occurred to me before.  That’s not love.  If you play out that scenario in your mind and enhance it to it’s utter extreme, eventually the self focus is so great, that you are virtually alone in the scene.  It reminds me of a scene in a romantic comedy.  A man was holding a woman’s hand and kissing and kissing it until eventually he was kissing his own hand, unaware, while the woman sat beside him in disgusted disbelief.  It was as if she wasn’t there.

Through the lens of control, there’s a tendency to feel that such depth of affection would bind that person to me and ensure an end to my loneliness, which is why unreciprocated love is so humiliating.  Through the lens of love, however, being “in love” means that someone is having an experience that could influence their well being for better or worse.

So that was something of an epiphany, which naturally caused my fantasy to dramatically transform, if not die altogether, and I realized that were I ever to have that experience, the first thought in my mind would be sympathetic joy (one of the “four immeasurables” in Buddhism, happiness for another’s happiness) and appreciation.  I would have my concern at the ready.  How might this influence that person’s life?  How might this make their life better, and how might it fill their life with challenges and emotions?  I’m ashamed that I haven’t seen it this way all along.