Different Kinds of Love

We feel and experience love in different ways. Some love is passionate, some is compassionate. Learning how to find balance between compassion and passion is key to successful relationships.

My grandmother on my dad’s side told me when I was young, that I was put on this earth to love other people.  When I think back on it, this one thing she said has had a profound impact on my life and how I choose to live it and who I am as a person. I am here to love other people. That is my purpose.

How I choose to manifest that love depends on the situation. I love a lot of people: my husband and son, my extended family on both sides, my friends and acquaintances.  And more abstractly I love the other 7 billion people that make up my human family.  Oh – and I love my pets too.

I talk a lot about compassion as it relates to my practice as a Humanist. To me, compassion is an expression of my love for others. As a Humanist, I experience compassionate love as Promethean – meaning it is aimed at alleviating the suffering of others.  It is why I work so hard to make the world a better place.

But my compassionate love is also more immediate. It’s not just an abstract Promethean urge. It’s also about how I feel about people when I meet them and interact with them. It’s protective and caring.

But my love can also be passionate. Specifically, the sexual yearning I have for my husband or the intense protectiveness I sometimes feel for my son.  My life, every day is so filled with love that I rarely experience depression or aloneness.

When I talk to others about this, I get the impression that the only love they are willing or want to experience is passionate love. When I suggest compassionate love, I meet resistance. Compassion is about helping others. What’s in it for me?

What’s in it is the feeling of love. Compassion has passion at it’s root.  It’s an intense feeling and it by and large feels really good to care about other people.  Compassion is intense. Just intense directed towards others instead of directed toward myself.  Passionate love is possessive. Compassionate love is altruistic.

And that is the key. We all need meaning and purpose in our life. Without it we are stressed and unhappy. What better meaning can you give your life than to live a life of love.

If you are worried that all this love for others will drain you don’t be. I was once asked if I would rather be in love or be loved. My answer was that I would rather be in love. Being in love feels great. Being loved doesn’t feel like much of anything. And if you don’t reciprocate it, having someone love you can be really annoying and frustrating and you feel bad for them. So I will always choose to be in love over being loved.  Perhaps that’s why I’m so happy.

If you need help learning how to be compassionate without being taken advantage of – consider taking this free ecourse from Dr. Marcia Sirota – Ruthless Compassion - https://humanistlearning.com/ruthless-compassion/

Standing Alone

While it often seems like we are all alone, the truth is, we are never alone. It only seems like we are.

In one sense, we are alone, in our own heads. We have a theory of mind that allows us to posit that other people have thoughts going on in their heads in much the same way we have thoughts going on in ours, but that is only a theory. We are stuck in our own heads. So, in that sense, we are alone all the time.

However, we are also biologically related to all life on the planet and chemically made up of the same stuff that makes up the universe. It's mind blowing when you think about it.

If we focus on just the humans and our connection to them, there are 7+ billion of us alive at the moment. We are all similar yet different. The key is to understand and accept the similarities and differences at the same time. When you can do that you get that each human is real, not just an abstract idea of a person, but a real person with a real life and real problems and real loves and a real job you know nothing about. The problem we have is that when we interact with other humans, we see and judge the interaction through our own lens of experience. The problem is that this provides us with a distorted view of the interaction. The other person or persons have their own lenses they are viewing things and judging things by and their own distortions.

What helps improve interpersonal interactions is to accept that your view is limited and inaccurate and seek to grasp the inherent realness of the other person’s experience. This requires you to get out of your head and to consider the other person as a person and that requires compassion (despite what horrid thing they may have done).  The beauty of doing this is that the act of consider people compassionately takes you out of your head, where you are stuck, and connects you emotionally to other people so that you aren't alone anymore. 

This aspect of compassion is the reason every major philosopher and teacher and religion teaches compassion in some form. It's incredibly powerful and helps eliminate that feeling of aloneness that is at the heart of most of our existential angst.

As to the question about ethical principles - all of our principles are a product of learning and experience and shared community. So even if you think your principles are yours alone, they aren't. They are a rather arbitrary mix of your own thoughts and what you have learned from and with others. Ethics is a communal activity. You can't do ethics or be moral in isolation. You can only be moral in relationship to other people. So no, in that sense, you don't stand alone even when you think you are.

What do you do to combat the feeling of being alone in the universe?