Get comfortable, I’m going in!

We hear it all the time.

Love is the answer.

It sounds beautiful. I happen to think there is something profoundly true in it.

But lately, another question has been bothering me.

If love is the answer, why have so many people who practised it been killed, imprisoned, persecuted, or rejected?

Jesus taught love and was crucified.

Gandhi practised nonviolence and was assassinated.

Martin Luther King Jr. preached love and nonviolence and was murdered.

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison.

Apparently, love doesn’t come with a very good protection plan.

And maybe that tells us something important.

What exactly are we expecting love to do?

Somewhere along the way, I wonder if we’ve turned love into a strategy.

Be loving, and people will love you back.

Forgive, and people will change.

Respond peacefully, and aggression will disappear.

Turn the other cheek, and eventually the other person will see the error of their ways.

Maybe.

But history suggests we shouldn’t count on it.

I have even been told that “turn the other cheek” is naïve. And if it means allowing someone to repeatedly hurt you while you smile peacefully and offer them another opportunity, I might agree.

But is that really love?

I don’t think love requires us to become doormats.

You can love someone and walk away.

You can understand someone and say no.

You can forgive someone and still hold them accountable.

You can have compassion for the person who harmed you while refusing to give them another opportunity to harm you.

You can love someone and call the police.

You can love someone and testify against them.

You can love someone and never see them again.

That may sound contradictory only because we’ve confused love with behaviour.

What if love isn’t an instruction?

This is where it gets interesting for me.

If we turn “love is the answer” into another rule for living, we’ve probably missed something.

What would love do?

Sounds like a useful question.

Until we start believing there is only one correct answer.

Maybe love hugs.

Maybe love stays.

Maybe love leaves.

Maybe love forgives.

Maybe love says, “Enough.”

Maybe love steps between someone vulnerable and the person hurting them.

The behaviour itself doesn’t necessarily tell us whether love is present.

Two people can perform exactly the same action from entirely different states of mind.

One person walks away because they hate you.

Another walks away because they love you and themselves enough to stop participating in something destructive.

From the outside, both walked away.

Inside, they may be living in entirely different worlds.

Love without the “so that”

Perhaps one of the most revealing things we can notice is what follows our love.

I love you so that you’ll love me.

I’ll forgive you so that you’ll apologize.

I’ll be compassionate so that you’ll change.

I’ll turn the other cheek so that you’ll recognize how enlightened I am.

That last one should at least earn us a spiritual merit badge.

But underneath all of these is a transaction.

I’ll give you this if the world eventually gives me something back.

What happens when we remove the “so that”?

I love you.

Period.

Now we are somewhere very different.

And perhaps somewhere much more frightening, because there is no guarantee attached.

Inner freedom does not guarantee outer freedom

This may be the distinction I find most important.

Viktor Frankl discovered something extraordinary under circumstances almost impossible for most of us to even imagine. Writing about his experience in the concentration camps, he remembered prisoners who comforted others and even gave away their last pieces of bread.

He wrote:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Frankl wasn’t writing from the comfort of an armchair. His external freedom had quite literally been taken from him.

And yet he noticed that something remained.

That distinction matters.

We can become inwardly free and still encounter an uncooperative world.

Other people still have their own thinking, fears, beliefs, conditioning, insecurities, ambitions, and realities.

My clarity doesn’t automatically produce yours.

My compassion doesn’t control your behaviour.

My peacefulness doesn’t guarantee your peacefulness.

My love doesn’t prevent you from hating me.

Inner freedom does not guarantee outer freedom.

And outer circumstances don’t necessarily determine inner freedom.

That changes the conversation considerably.

Maybe love doesn’t conquer all

I’ve heard that phrase most of my life.

Love conquers all.

I’m no longer sure I would say it that way.

Love doesn’t always conquer violence.

Love doesn’t always conquer injustice.

Love doesn’t guarantee survival.

Love doesn’t guarantee reciprocation.

Love doesn’t guarantee that the relationship will work.

Love doesn’t guarantee that the person you’re loving will suddenly wake up and see things differently.

And it certainly doesn’t guarantee that life will unfold according to our preferences.

Perhaps love isn’t here to conquer anything.

Maybe that’s the problem with the phrase.

Conquering still implies a battle.

A winner and a loser.

Something must defeat something else before peace can exist.

What if love isn’t interested in winning?

Then what does love change?

Perhaps less about the world than we’ve been led to believe.

And much more about our relationship with it.

When I’m no longer demanding that you become someone different before I can be okay, something changes.

When I don’t need you to agree with me before I can respect you, something changes.

When I can say no without needing to hate you, something changes.

When I can leave without spending the next twenty years prosecuting you inside my head, something changes.

When I can protect myself without turning you into a monster, something changes.

Not necessarily out there.

Here.

And from here, a different action may occur.

Not because I consulted the rulebook on loving behaviour.

Because there was simply less fear, resentment, judgement, and contaminated thinking deciding for me.

So, is love the answer?

Maybe.

But I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of answers.

The moment we turn love into a prescription, we can start measuring ourselves against it.

I shouldn’t be angry.

I should forgive.

I should stay.

I should turn the other cheek.

If I were more loving, I wouldn’t feel this way.

Now love has become another prison.

Perhaps love is much simpler than that.

Maybe it isn’t telling us what to do.

Maybe it doesn’t promise to protect us.

Maybe it doesn’t guarantee a happy ending.

Maybe it isn’t a strategy for changing other people at all.

Perhaps love is closer to what remains when, for a moment, we stop requiring life, ourselves, and everyone else to be different from what they are.

And from there?

We might hug someone.

We might forgive them.

We might walk away.

We might stand our ground.

We might say no.

We might turn the other cheek.

Or perhaps, occasionally, wisdom will suggest that we’ve already turned enough cheeks for one lifetime.

I don’t know that love is the answer.

But I am increasingly curious about what becomes possible when love no longer requires an outcome.

Maybe the people who practised it and paid dearly for doing so understood something we sometimes miss.

Love was never a guarantee of what the world would do to them.

It was something much closer to who they were while the world was doing whatever it did.

And perhaps that isn’t naïve at all.

Perhaps that is freedom.

Much Love,

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