You can love somebody completely and still be using them.
That is the hardest sentence I've had to sit with. Not because I haven't heard it. Because I've lived both sides of it.
Not the way the word "using" usually lands. Not cynically, not without care. The love is real. The longing is real. The 2 AM text you almost sent is real. The way their laugh sounds different in a parking lot than it does inside is the realest thing on earth and you can name it down to the note.
And still be using them.
Not for sex, though sometimes that too. For something older. Something that has no clean name in English but that every language seems to have a smudged version of. The mystics call it the God-shaped hole. The addicts call it the Hole. I've called it the Ache. What I'm trying to name right now is the thing you're reaching for when you reach for another person and you know, somewhere quiet in the chest, that the reach is bigger than the person.
Most romantic love is the right letter going to the wrong address.
The love is real
I want to be clear about that before anything else. The love is real. It is not a mistake. It is not confusion. The feeling of another person unlocking something in you, of their particular presence doing what no other presence does, of the world making a different kind of sense with them in it than it does without them, that is not an illusion. That is actual data about actual things.
The love is not wrong. The routing is.
When you fall for someone, part of what you're falling into is a brief, sustained experience of contact. Of not being separate. The gap between yourself and everything closes. You are suddenly, improbably, part of something larger than your own skull and its ongoing monologue. You feel chosen, which means you feel legible, which means you feel like you exist in a way that gets confirmed by something outside of yourself.
Mystics spend entire lifetimes trying to manufacture that exact state. You just found it in a person who makes a specific sound when they're trying not to laugh.
The address is wrong
The state you're seeking, that contact, that unlocking, that presence, is not native to another person. No person can hold that much. It's asking the mail carrier to be the letter. They're not built for it.
This is why romantic love has a particular kind of collapse built into it. Not always. But frequently. The collapse happens when the delivery fails. When the person, being a person and not a portal, cannot sustain the state they unlocked. When life resumes its normal programming and the gap between you and everything returns and the person is now just a person, not the answer to the question you didn't know you were asking.
The heartbreak is real. And it is not entirely about the person.
Part of what you're grieving, maybe most of what you're grieving, is the state they let you touch briefly. The contact. The unlocking. The brief experience of not being separate. That state is what you were looking for before you found them. It will be what you're looking for after. They were not the source of it. They were a particularly convincing door.
What divine love actually is
I'm going to use that word because I don't have a better one and I don't want to perform not having one. Divine love. Not the religious version, not the church-on-Sunday version, not the thing that requires a particular belief structure as a membership fee. The other thing. The thing the mystics of every tradition kept arriving at through different routes and describing with the same face.
Divine love is not love aimed at a person. It is love as a state of being. It is what you're inside of when the 2 AM parking lot makes your chest hurt with how beautiful it is, without anyone in the parking lot. It is the love that comes up when you hold something extremely small. A sleeping animal, a child, a cold stone in your hand. When you sit in a room full of strangers and notice, all at once, that everyone in the room is trying, and the trying breaks your heart open instead of making you tired.
It has no object. Or its object is everything. Both. Always both.
Romantic love is what happens when that state attaches to a specific person and travels through them instead of being free. The attachment is not the problem. The problem is confusing the attachment for the source.
The difference
Romantic love says: I feel this because of you. Divine love says: I feel this. The difference is the "because of you."
When you pull the "because of you" out, two things happen. First, the love doesn't go anywhere. It stays. It's still there. It was always there. The person helped you see it, find it, access it, but they didn't generate it. That was yours before they arrived and it will be yours after.
Second, the person gets to be a person. Not a source. Not a container for your spiritual hunger. Not responsible for maintaining a state they didn't create. They get to be whoever they actually are, which is less than a portal. And also more. More specific, more flawed, more real, more interesting than the version you fell in love with.
Most relationship problems are the portal mistaking itself for the destination. Or the person being asked to remain a portal after the door closed.
The addict's version of this problem
The addict's tragedy is not that he wanted the wrong thing. The tragedy is that the wrong thing was almost the right shape. The substance opened the door. It produced, chemically, a version of the contact experience. Not love, exactly, but the feeling of the gap closing. The gap between the self and everything else, narrowed, briefly, to nothing.
Romantic love does the same thing through a different mechanism. Both are mistaking the door for the room. Both are sending the letter to the carrier instead of the destination.
The recovery work I've done has mostly been learning to find the room without the door. To locate the contact without the substance, without the person, without the anything that I was using to get there. It turns out the room was always accessible. The doors were just faster, and speed is a kind of lie about distance.
What to do with this
I'm not saying don't love people. That would be stupid, and also impossible. I'm saying let the love be two things at once. The specific, attached, this-particular-person version AND the awareness that underneath it, running through it, is something larger that belongs to no one.
The specific love is real and worth protecting. The underlying state is real and doesn't need protecting. It's already there. It was there before the person showed up. It's the water. The person is a glass. The glass is useful. The glass is not the water.
The work, as I understand it, is learning to drink from both. To love the person clearly, without asking them to be the divine. To find the divine without requiring a person to mediate it. Neither route cancels the other. The specific and the enormous can live in the same chest. They usually do, in the people who have done enough of this to know what they're holding.
The ache doesn't mean the person is gone. The ache means the mail got returned. The address was wrong. The letter is still yours. It was always yours. You were just looking for somewhere to send it.
The love was never coming from the person. It was coming through them. The source is not in the address book.
This field note draws on territory from Spiritual Homesickness (forthcoming) and connects to The Itch You Can't Reach. Both books are on the Books page.
Take what's useful. Leave what isn't.