The Price of Love

How do we handle love when its price is too high? How do we choose to make the right choice toward ourselves and others when love becomes too difficult?

In general, I think that true love implies the ability to see the essence of the person we love and figure out how to keep each other company along the way.

Having a violent partner or possessive parents might induce in us the temptation to refuse love and isolate ourselves in a bubble. The problem is that this isolation might decrease our sense of meaning and purpose in life. As shown in philosophical cosmologies (Empedocle’s theory of the Sphairos, for example), love is described as the connecting force of life—the more love that is in our lives, the more alive we are.

Closing the door to love brings us a step further from life and its meaning. So, how do we remain alive when the price to be loved or to love someone is too high? How can we keep the door open to love when our partner is abusive or our friends want us to be somebody else?

Channel your transformational energy

I think that instead of enduring a form of love that is emotionally too "expensive," we might decide to use the transformational energy we want to force on the person we love to change ourselves. When we wish to be loved by someone who is asking too much from us, we suffer. Our suffering occurs because we implicitly desire them to finally see us and to get from us just what we have.

Implicitly, we desire for them to change. We wish for them to become less demanding, protective, possessive, or even violent. What I think is that we might just choose to channel that wishing energy on ourselves and give ourselves the love we wish to receive from those persons.

We might choose to change into the person we wait for others to see in us. We can distance ourselves from a demanding parent or a possessive boyfriend without ceasing to love that person or care for them. We just use the love we wish to receive from them on ourselves in order to nurture the qualities we would like our loved ones to appreciate in us. Generally, that creates a virtuous circle for which, in the end, we have more compassion and love to give to our "problematic" loved ones.

Love problems make us wiser

According to Plato in his Phaedrus, problems in love make us wiser because their irrationality gives us a chance to connect more deeply with ourselves in search of meaningful answers. Eros as a fulfilled sensual pleasure keeps us entangled with mundane tasks, but eros as a mad, unpredictable force puts us in contact with our psyche because it reminds us of our shortcomings and encourages us to find our connection with deeper and more satisfying answers. Human love is dragged down by the fleeting promise of gratification.

“You should know that the friendship of a lover arises without any goodwill at all. No, like food, its purpose is to sate hunger. ‘Do wolves love [agaposin] lambs?’ That’s how lovers [erastai, from eros] befriend [philousin] a boy” (241c-d).

For Plato, unfulfilled love is what leads us to the right contemplation of essential truths. Problematic love is for us an opportunity to elevate ourselves above our limits; this love can guide us to the connection with the cosmic harmony of love, which seems in Plato free from any material condition.

Love does not mean that we are condemned to accept the ways of an abusive partner; it means that we can see their unfair violence, but we stop making excuses for them in the pointless effort to justify our life in relation to them. Love does not mean to mistreat our child, our partner, or ourselves because we realize that their life does not correspond to our expectations; it means to have eyes to see what kind of life that is and to have a heart capable of accepting the social and ethical implications of that life. In Man's Search For Meaning, Frankl enhances this belief by paralleling human capacity to love to living a meaningful life:

"Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the essence of another human being unless he loves him. [...]”

Love makes us wiser and capable of accessing the deepest meaning of each other’s lives.