Unconditional love is not so much about how we receive and endure each other as it is about the deep vow to never, under any condition, stop bringing the flawed truth of who we are to each other. ~ Mark Nepo

 

I do realize that my publicity for this sermon (with its promise to reveal “Ten Commandments of Love”) might have come across as heavy-handed. I’ve heard UUs joke about not believing in the Ten Commandments, but rather in the Ten Suggestions. In that anti-authoritarian spirit, this hereby presents to you my Ten Suggestions for

safeguarding and strengthening the love in your life – whether it’s love for a romantic partner, a friend, a family member, or the people you choose to be in relationship with.

 

In a similarly anti-authoritarian spirit, you’re invited to take or leave, to practice or not practice, or to otherwise amend as you see fit. First, a disclaimer: I know how hard it can be to sustain loving relationships; I’m no Love Guru. I may be standing on a chancel, but there’s no “talking down” happening here. We’re all practicing, all the time.

 

Suggestion #11

(...once I changed “commandments” to “suggestions,” I figured that I can also count as creatively as I want to): Remember That We All Just Want to Be Loved

 

That’s it – it’s pretty simple.

 

In a very, very famous book by Elizabeth Gilbert¹, we hear about her friend Deborah, a psychologist:

 

Back in the 1980s, she was asked [to] offer psychological counseling to a group of Cambodian refugees – boat people – who had recently arrived in the city. Deborah... was terribly daunted by this task. These Cambodians

had suffered the worst of what humans can inflict on each other – genocide, rape, torture, starvation, the murder of their relatives before their eyes, then long years in refugee camps and dangerous boat trips to the West... —what could Deborah offer these people in terms of help? How could she possibly relate to their suffering? “But don’t you know,” Deborah reported to me, “what all these people wanted to talk about [with] a counselor?” It was all: I met this guy when I was living in the refugee camp, and we fell in love. I thought he really loved me, but then we were separated on different boats, and he took up with my cousin. Now he’s married to her, but he says he really loves me, and he keeps calling me, and  I know I should tell him to go away, but I still love him and I can’t stop thinking about him. And I don’t know what to do… This is what we are like. Collectively, as a species, this is our emotional landscape....

 

...“There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who’s in charge?” Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love

and control undo us all...

 

Suggestion #10: You’re the Decider

 

It’s not the case that easy relationships are automatically the good or worthwhile ones, and that complex or difficult relationships are less healthy. I don’t believe that outsiders can ever have a truly accurate understanding of your relationship, especially when it’s one of the messy, complicated ones. Only you – the one in the relationship – gets to decide whether yours is a love worth fostering and strengthening. Only you can judge

your relationship, no matter how easy or hard it is, and know whether it’s worth valuing. You can listen to the observations and feedback of those around you – or ask their advice, if you’re intrepid – but at the end of the day, you and that other person comprise a Universe of Two, both its sole constituency and governors.

 

Suggestion #9: It Takes Two to Tango

 

It takes two to create love. It takes two to build intimacy. It also takes two people to rupture a relationship, and it takes those same two people to decide to repair it. If a relationship is a constituency of two, then both of its parts must be invested and interested in the relationship’s success. Whether it’s platonic or romantic, a loving

relationship can’t survive if one person is half-hearted or indifferent. If that’s the case, it’s both tragic and liberating for the invested half: tragic not to have your love and commitment returned, but freeing to know that, in the timeless words of that great philosopher, Bonnie Raitt, “I can’t make you love me if you don’t... you can’t make a heart feel something it won’t.”

 

Suggestion #8: Self-Differentiate

 

If you need saving, one person’s love will not save you.

 

I believe that some people yearn for a love so impossibly pervasive that they carry that dull ache with them their whole lives; it can’t be filled by any one person, or family, or even by a thousand friends. Whether that hunger arises from early damage or from simple hard-wiring, some of our boats sail on a sea where the menacing dragons of loneliness circle. In these circumstances, it takes a supreme amount of clarity to separate what’s “mine” and what’s “yours.” It takes knowing ourselves and our needs well enough to answer, with honesty, the questions Will your love be enough for me? and Do I have love to share with you?

 

Intimacy and love are mutual propositions; if you’re not reasonably comfortable with and loving towards yourself, then happiness and security won’t enter your life when you find the “right friend” or “soul mate” (I’m not even going to try to unpack that term).

 

Self-differentiated people love well because they know that intimacy stems not from need, but from knowing ourselves and wanting to know another person. That’s selfdifferentiation: being your own person, doing the work, taking “responsibility for ourselves, with all the discomfort that may apply.”²

 

Suggestion #7: Practice the Art of Fair Expectations

 

One person cannot be all things to another; nurturing love means tempering our hopes against reality. For example: a life partner can’t be expected to be a great lover, steadfast friend, wise counsel, skilled home repairperson, gourmet cook, fearless breadwinner, witty conversationalist, unfailing calendar coordinator, spiritual co-pilgrim, compatible co-parent, and someone who puts the cap back on the toothpaste. (Personally, however, I think that putting the toilet seat down is not too much to ask.)

 

Suggestion #6: You Get to Ask for What You Need

 

In healthy relationships, notes one psychotherapist,³ “there is an... understanding that each person will be actively supported in their psychological and social growth by the other, and is not in need of protection from reality.” It’s up to you to discover, and voice, what you need from the other person to live into that growth. Your needs might change over time, requiring some flexibility on your partner’s (or friend’s) part and patience on your own. But you get to ask, without demanding, for that which will allow you to be the most authentic self you can be.

 

Suggestion #5: ...And So Does the Other Guy

 

If love is a dance of reciprocity, then we also need to check in with those we love, and create space for the other to freely express whether we’re helping meet their needs.

 

Balance often requires infinite small adjustments, on all sides.

 

Suggestion #4: Love DOES Mean Saying “I’m Sorry”

 

I can phrase this no better than does psychotherapist Stephanie Dowrick⁴, whose commentary is as follows:

 

...[O]ne of the most mindless phrases that ever came into widespread use is from the 1970 movie Love Story, a saccharine tale of two, beautifully, barely adult lovers torn apart by... untimely death. Ryan O’Neal and Ali

McGraw... did their best, but neither they nor we were well-served by a line that came to be closely associated with a bizarre version of selfless love.

 

‘Love,’ murmured Ali, as she edged towards the Great Horizon, ‘means never having to say you are sorry.’ On the contrary, Ali. Loves allows you not only to say that you are sorry, but to be sorry – and to rise again.⁴

 

Suggestion #3: Life-Giving Relationships Are Fed by Life-Giving Fuel

 

In order for two people to thrive in a loving relationship, you have to bond over that which is life-giving. If your identity, as partners or as friends, becomes seeking grist for a mill of criticism and complaint about the world and people around you, your relationship is doomed. One of our Unitarian grandmamas, the Transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller, listed four kinds of marriage⁵: the most elevated of which is “the pilgrimage of two souls toward a common shrine.” This tenet is expressed differently, but similarly, in the words of a modern Zen practitioner,⁶ who says, “I really believe that you can’t have a... love relationship without each having a relationship with the Infinite – or with some spiritual path. There has to be that third element... [you] relate to each other through that Infinite...”

 

Suggestion #2: Love Might Not Be Enough, But History Matters

 

Sometimes, love isn’t enough to hold two people together. Some friendships and other “love relationships” have a life expectancy that falls short of our own wishes and expectations, and willfulness. If your needs go unmet for long periods of time; if your “other” cannot or will not actively support your growth and well-being; if your

personhood is assaulted or disregarded by the other, you get to decide whether to leave the relationship. You are allowed to sacrifice relationships when they’re damaging to you. Decide carefully, knowing that your decision might be irrevocable. Consider, too, that a shared history with someone else counts; it matters, and sometimes we don’t realize that until it’s lost.

 

Suggestion #1: Love Means Choosing Again and Again

 

You don’t necessarily choose your loves, but you must choose to keep loving them.

 

Loving friendships and agape – the love of beloved community – are ours only as long as we invest time and energy into them. Eros – romantic love, the love of intimate partnerships – even more so. In the whole of human history, ours are (just about) the first generations in which people have been able to marry the partner of their heart’s choosing. For much of human history, marriage was done for economic reasons, for political reasons, for reasons of lineage and reproduction and inheritance. Today, in this country, we marry for love – something, it would seem, wholly beyond our conscious control.

 

But it is within our control. It must be. Once love chooses us, we must choose it back through our simple, everyday actions. Through repair attempts. Through learning to listen. Through making choices that uphold and reinforce love.

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Every person reading this knows that love can take years to construct and protect, and an instant to lose.

 

You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and your heart’s little intelligence, and listen to me.

 

There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life toward it.

 

 

Endnotes

 

1. Eat, Pray, Love. P. 156.

2. Stephanie Dowrick, Forgiveness & Other Acts of Love, p. 305.

3. Stephanie Dowrick, Forgiveness & Other Acts of Love, p. 303.

4. In Forgiveness & Other Acts of Love, pp. 304-5.

5. In Richardson’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire, p. 193+

6. Quoted in Forgiveness & Other Acts of Love by Stephanie Dowrick, p. 105.