I don’t know a person who has not, at one time or another, felt a longing for greater love in their life. The absence of enough like-minded friends around, less support and success in a particular endeavour than one would wish, a sense of rarely being understood, or the absence of sincere, satisfying romantic or sexual connection, can leave us in great pain and suffering, even if it might seem we are surrounded by many people who care about us. We are all, always longing to be loved, in a world where there is so much confusion about what love even is, and what it might mean to love each other well.
It seems we are often coached to solve these struggles with behaviours. A behavioural therapist might suggest we go out more, find a hobby, join a book club, download a dating app. The Buddhist teacher might suggest meditating on loving kindness, for oneself or others. My bright, clever, interesting, motivated clients diligently employ these strategies. They have been drip fed stories by their environment that this will simply and effectively engineer the emotional fulfilment and intimacy they long for. They are, repeatedly, sorely disappointed and increasingly disillusioned. What’s more, they are also led to believe so often that the failing of these strategies is a fault of theirs - that they obviously just didn’t try hard enough, or choose the right hobby, or give it enough time - further wounding and shaming them around what is only a clear, clean, human wish for connection.
I see more and more than we need more nuanced stories to explain our unfulfilled longing. We need to keep room for the possibility that, if we do not feel love, the places in us in which we receive and experience it are themselves, injured, perhaps gravely so. What we need may not be another, more rigorous, behavioural strategy, but an opportunity to find that within us which has closed to the very love we long for, perhaps simply as the result of the thousands of micro-hurts we all encounter in the basic course of being human. It may be that, while we long deeply to love and be loved, we are also terrified of receiving this very thing we crave. For many of us, internal work is required, not to heal that active, seeking, motivated part of us that has been constantly coached by an action-oriented world from the very beginning of our conscious lives, but the quiet, receptive aspect of us needed to allow in the love that is already waiting by the door.
We can feel a sense of hurt sometimes at the prospect of this internal work. It feels like a banishment: more time away from others, more isolation and lovelessness. As healers, we can offer our patients and clients hope in the thought that engaging deeply with themselves is not a consolation prize in their wish to experience love with others, to adore and be adored, but an active pathway towards its fulfilment. By allowing the wounded parts of themselves to come forward and to be heard and mended in their own heart space, and perhaps in the cocoon of the right kind of therapy or healing relationship, they may find a new lens through which it becomes clear that the love they long for is available in little nooks and crannies of their lives where they never imagined it might grow. No hobbies required.