Love, Infinity

Perhaps the hardest-fought lesson I’ve learned, from conception to practical application and implementation: love is infinite.

I’ve always sensed love as a strain on the limits of my capacity; that inexplicable overflowing of something more powerful than what will fit within the human experience. An exquisite, achy swelling of my heart, mind and life coupled with the comforting current of replenishment.

Like a feverish attempt to catch every drop of water cascading from the rocks above in buckets, and knowing the fruitlessness of the exercise without caring, because the sun is warm on my back and the water is clean and slippery on my skin. The water will run over the rocks for the rest of time, and I’ll never catch it all, but I’m more than content to wear myself out trying until sweet exhaustion calls me to a deep sleep, so I can try again tomorrow.

That’s what loving someone feels like to me. The scenery of the waterfall and the characteristics of the water are as varied as the people in my life, but they’re all variations on that theme.

As powerful as that feeling is within me, your ability to experience it relies on my ability to express it and your capacity to receive it. The reverse is also true- your love for me may be as unending as a river running into the sea, but without expression and perception, it doesn’t exist from my side.

Which is exactly how I got tricked into attempting to measure something immeasurable.

I looked at the investment of limited resources: time, attention, energy and money, to gauge love. The way we spend what we don’t have an endless supply of says much about who we are and how we see the world. It speaks to our values and our circumstances, and certainly our capacity for commitment.

The error lies in attributing those things to what lies in the deepest parts of our hearts. This perspective is dangerous; you can have someone’s time, attention, energy and money while their love eludes you, just as you can be loved deeply and not receive these investments because some unrelated constraint prevents it. Some people manage an alignment of their investments with the people and projects they love the most, but most of us are bound by practical limitations, not the least of which is our own willingness and ability to express our love for others.

For so long, I struggled with jealousy and the desire to possess and control. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that those negative feelings appear to be about the allocation of resources, but they aren’t at all. When I’m secure in someone’s love, I care less about how they spend their time, attention, energy and money. Something unspoken and ancient understands that the water will flow tomorrow, next week, and next year. That comfort allows me to see the logical and practical concerns that sometimes cause temporary shortages of investment in relationship. The ebb and swelling of passion’s tide is just so much weather; the healthy cycle of human interest and the old, familiar dance of any kind of long-term relationship.

Insecurity motivates jealousy and grasping; the heart knows something is missing and sends the mind off to find it. When we look for proof or lack of love by accounting for another’s investment, we’re reducing love- limitless and immeasurable- to those limited resources. In our insecurity, we begin to view love as a commodity. What someone else gets leaves less for us. That is entirely true of time, attention, energy and money, and when we’ve given priority to people and relationships and not had that preference returned, it hurts.

Attempting to ease that discomfort by garnering more of those already limited resources is a losing game that addresses the symptom and not the problem: either the love isn’t there, or something is intercepting the transmission.

Both problems are only worsened by grasping and clinging- you can demand a higher priority, but even if you are awarded a temporary promotion it won’t soothe the nagging emptiness of the gesture.

This is the puzzle of compatibility; figuring out what each person wants and needs, and whether the two of you can ever come to mutually beneficial terms, where each person feels valued and accepted because their needs are met without resentment. The chasm between love and compatibility stretches nine-tenths the width of all the misery in this world.

Fairy tales teach us that love conquers all, but I prefer the lesson of Casablanca. Love does not conquer, it transcends.

The conquering is up to us.