Speaking of Love

Rev. John Millspaugh
February 23, 2003

Speaking of love is a dangerous activity. What can be said? Any description of love from a pulpit might leave listeners feeling discouraged that their love doesn’t measure up, rather than inspired to live more fully. And I can’t say I’m qualified to speak on this topic; it’s not like I have had the full range of human experience in this area. Although I suppose none of us have.

So much has been said about love, so many of our songs are about love, mostly because no words ever capture the importance and depth of love. Love is one of the most profound human experiences. It is one of the noblest aspirations. It’s at the core of religion. But you’ll rarely hear a sermon directly about Love from any pulpit. No matter how much you talk about the ocean, it is not the same as swimming in it. Speaking about love cannot get you to the real thing.

So you know all that and you know that I’m going ahead with a sermon called “Speaking of Love,” so you might be thinking I ate a few too many chocolate hearts last week. But although speaking of love cannot bring us love, I think speaking of love can help us grow in our love.

Chocolate hearts, pre-printed cards, plastic-wrapped flowers, and . . . love.

It is one week after Valentine’s Day, and I’m guessing that many of us spent at least a little time in recent weeks browsing cards at the Hallmark store or in the supermarket. I did, and in those cards I have to say I found an astonishing number of declarations of love that were questionable at best. Words are very important to me, so I ended up reading thirty or so cards. So many of the cards I read I wouldn’t wish on the sweetheart of my worst enemy. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that mass-produced cards largely promote commercialized sentimentality and generally unrealistic expectations about what it means to be in a romantic relationship. 

But what worries me is that as a culture, many of our most personal views of love—Love!—are shaped by commercial institutions trying to make money. For florists, greeting card companies, and candy makers, Valentine’s Day is the single biggest economic event in the year.“ Without this holiday and Christmas, many of these businesses would not be financially viable.” So ask any economist, what does that mean? Those businesses “have a vested interest in creating and perpetuating a commercialized and materialist view of love and relationships.”[1]

Now, I’m not about to suggest that we all go picket the Hallmark store. Although that could be fun! But no, giving flowers and candy and cards to those we love is lovely, if those symbols help them deeply know they are cared about. But when the predominant messages carried by those symbols promote problematic perspectives on love, we’ll get in trouble if we take on those definitions as our own images of authentic love. Do you agree? Who would want these corporate, commercial and materialistic images as their own personal definitions of love? 

Well, apparently a lot of people do. You may not know this about me yet, but I’ve performed a lot of wedding ceremonies, ranging from a couple in their early twenties to a couple in their early eighties. I’ve also married a lesbian couple, although their loving union is yet to be recognized by law. 

During my wedding planning sessions with couples I ask them to look deeply inside and tell me why they want to be marry to this other person. Why this form of relationship, why this person, why now? A fair number of individuals will say something along the lines of, “I feel that he completes me. I’m not fully myself when I am not with him. It’s like we were made to be together.” When I hear that, I get worried. 

Not that these ideas are anything unusual. Identifying those sort of feelings as love has a long and respected history. Plato’s student Aristotle, for example, tells a creation story in which the first creatures on earth were not humans, but sort of giant amoebas. Eventually, each giant amoeba split in two, each half took on human form, and now each half wanders the earth looking for its lost mate. Finding its lost mate—its other half, if you will—will once again complete it and make it whole.

Well now that’s sweet story. I bet you never knew there could be a sweet story about giant amoebas. But that’s rather touching and compelling, and that’s a romantic image, and according to most modern research, that image is dangerous and destructive and a cause of a great deal of marital strife. “Psychologist and marriage counselor Harville Hendrix, author of Getting the Love You Want, describes [a marriage based on this sort of understanding] as an "unconscious marriage" – a union between two "half" people who are unconsciously seeking someone else to make them feel "whole." He explains that most of us have "psychological wounds" left by our primary caretakers when we were young. Hendrix contends that as we mature, we unconsciously seek out that person who reminds us most of our parents or other primary care takers.”[2] Maybe, if we unconsciously feel inadequate, maybe they can complete us and make us feel okay about ourselves.

But even we find someone willing to try to help us feel whole, our partner is doomed to eventually fail in this attempt, no matter how hard they work at it. No one can “make” anyone else happy or complete. It might work pretty well for a few months or even several years, but there inevitably arise serious ways in which partners do not gratify each other. Ways in which they do not complete the other. When this happens to us in our relationships, my colleague Reverend Carol Huston writes, “we become furious with each other, because we feel that our partner has broken an "unconscious contract" that we made with each other when we first met . . . the key word here is UNCONSCIOUS, because we usually can't see what's going on. Instead, we react illogically, almost like a child, pushing each other's emotional hot buttons as we try to "make" our partner behave the way we "need" her or him to behave in order to make us feel whole – that is, to meet our unmet needs of our earlier life.[3]

So each partner works to change the other. But each partner has a deep need to stay the same. So power struggles develop—in the bedroom, over the checkbook, over the children, and even over seemingly petty issues. It begins to taint all aspects of the relationship. Differences come to be interpreted as being about a lack of love. If you really loved me, you would act like this. You would be like that. Arguments escalate, and feelings get hurt, sometimes intentionally, in an effort to control. In an effort to feel complete through another person.

This is the sort of love I heard about yesterday when I was driving to our Worship Associate Training meeting, and I flipped on the radio to hear the line, “If your love could be caged, honey, I would hold the key and conceal it.” This sort of feeling is one of selfishness and control. It feels like love for the other person, but it is more like a desperate and need-based appreciation for what the other person does for you. 

Over the months or over the years, people who cling to this concept of love can find themselves working harder and harder just to maintain the relationship. “Some couples try to work it out on their own. Some call it quits” and go on, and often “continue in the same pattern with another person). What's amazing to me is that others stay together and continue to fight with each other for the rest of their lives.”[4] You probably know couples who have gone for decades in this same pattern.

On the bright side, marriage counselors find that individuals striving to make each other whole and complete often do have the ability to shift their understanding of the nature of love, and slowly transform their relationship. All of us are capable of moving toward a healthier image of what it means to love and be loved by another person. 

And some of us don’t have too far to go to reach that healthier place. Some individuals I work with in wedding counseling, from the beginning, seem to know that each partner has to take responsibility for their own thoughts, feelings, actions, and wholeness. That no one else can do that work for that person. Love serves needs, but love is note about needs. There is a difference between love that serves a need and love that springs from a need. Love is about sharing the fullness of our identity with another person. You’ll not find this on a Hallmark card, but I believe authentic love is about two people, already working toward wholeness, who desire and choose to be in a conscious and supportive relationship with one another. Love is a decision and a choice and a commitment. Love is not so much a force that has a hold on us as it a conscious expression of our spirituality. 

Yes, spirituality. It’s okay to talk about spirituality, love, and even sex in the same sentence. Freudians, you know, think that spirituality is just a sublimated way of expressing sexual desire. But I think Freudians have it backward. It might be more helpful to think of sex as a healthy expression of spirituality, of our desire to express our authentic self, to deeply connect beyond our own consciousness, to be accepted and cherished as we are.

When we love authentically, new worlds of possibility open. Tom Owen-Towle writes in his book Hard Blessings: Doing the Work of Love: 

“At a dinner party some time ago, I sat next t a man who was an oceanographer. At one point he asked me if I had ever wondered why lobsters could weigh one pound, three pounds, even ten pounds[,] when they had such a hard shell. How could they grow? I had to tell him that resolving this fascinating quandary was not high on my list of priorities.

“He smiled and proceeded to explain that when a lobster becomes crowded in its shell and can’t grow anymore, by instinct it travels out to some place in the sea, hoping for relative safety and begins to shed its shell. It’s a terribly dangerous process—the lobster has to risk its life, because once it becomes naked, vulnerable, it can be dashed against a reef or eaten by another lobster or fish. But that’s the only way it can grow.”[5]

Plenty of times, we as individuals will need to go to the reef. A lobster sheds its shell 25 times in its first 5-7 years of life. We, too, will have many times in our life when staying in a tight shell becomes stagnating. When we feel that nagging urge to “break through self-imposed, constricting barriers” and grow. What we need from a partner in those times is not someone who will feel threatened by our changes. Who will want to cage us, just as we are, and hide the key. Who will be mostly frightened by our growth, or stare at our innermost-being at its most naked with an air of judgment. What we need from our partners is someone who will stand by us in our time of vulnerability, and choose to love us not just for who me might be but for us as we are, and at times, love us in spite of who we are. And it is worth noting: that’s what our partners need from us as well. And not just when they need to go to the reef. 

Love which is based on need and inadequacy seeks to change the other person, and discovers that the other person cannot or will not change. Authentic love, even though it serves needs, and even when it nudges the other person toward growth, authentic love accepts the person as they are. And here’s the irony: when we know that we are authentically loved, loved just as we are from a place of integrity, that is when we can begin significant transformation. When we are loved not from a place of need but loved just as we are from a place of integrity, that is when we can begin significant transformation.

With the best intentions and the best efforts, not all relationships work out, nor should all relationships work out. Authentic love for another person, romantic or otherwise, is such a profoundly complicated enterprise that it is surprising that it ever works out halfway well. Since it is so complicated, and since it is so important, let us be careful about the images we use as we strive to love. Let us make love our aim, and let us be clear what we are aiming for. Through this heartfelt and centered and whole loving, we live out our spirituality. Through heartfelt and centered love, first for ourselves, then in our most intimate relationships, we can begin to live out our aspiration to honor the inherent dignity and worth of every person. 

So may it be. 

Shalom, Salaam, Namaste, Blessed Be, and Amen.

[1] Patrick Price, “Love and More Than Love” UU Fellowship of Columbia SC, February 13, 2000     (Return to article)

[2] Carol Huston, Speech on Love, February, 2000.    (Return to article)

[3] ibid.    (Return to article)

[4] ibid.    (Return to article)

[5] Tom Owen-Towle, Hard Blessings: Doing the Work of Love.    (Return to article)