The essence of love

"To the extent you know love, you become love.  Love is more than an emotion.  It is a force of nature and therefore contains truth.  When you say the word 'love,' you may catch a glimpse of the feeling, but the essence of it cannot be accurately and completely spoken.  The purest love lies where it is least expected - in unattachment."
-- Deepak Chopra

I had a long conversation with a client/friend today about the distinction between "love" and "need."  It was a hard conversation, because we could both see that, in the midst of his deep emotional longing for love, he "needed" it to be proven by his wife beyond the slightest doubt (an impossibility if you doubt it in the first place) in order to experience it as true, which only resulted in it running away from him in defiance.  In response to it eluding him, and out of guilt for having abandoned "knowing" it, he was busy unconsciously working to destroy it, in a sad form of retaliation, so that he could continue "needing" it, since this is what we learn to do - to create more of what we know from the past so that we continue worrying about the future. 

Allowing love to wash over you, experiencing it as "what is" in your partnership, is what creates and expands the ongoing experience of it.  To do so without attachment expands it to infinity - you simply become love.  Here's to you, K., as you go off on vacation to ponder this phenomenon and then to invite love back into your life, because you surely deserve it, and so does your wife. And please remember you are not alone.  You are experiencing this for all of us who see ourselves in you.  Thank you for your courageous and generous spirit.  May we all learn to experience what it is to love and be loved.