Love threatens your existence while it drags you in.
No, that's not my thought. This was the theme of a recent piece by Sadhguru for the Huffington Post. It's written from a Hindu perspective. I am not of that faith or belief system, but as I read it, I saw the wisdom in the thought process so I wanted to share it with my readers.
According to the article, the Hindus believe that people are made of 4 components: the body, mind, emotion and energy. Of these 4 parts, the strongest force is emotion. A big part of the force of emotion is the power of love. Sadhguru notes that in acknowledging that you love someone, you have acknowledged another person as meaning far more to you than you mean to yourself. It threatens your existence.
The moment you say "I love you" to somebody, you will lose all your freedom, you will lose everything that you have. You can no longer do what you want in your life; there are innumerable problems. But at the same time, it drags you in. It is a sweet poison, a very sugary poison. It is self-annihilating.
Sadhguru believes that to know love - to truly experience it - some part of you must die. The person you love must destroy the space formerly occupied by your single-minded independent thoughts, choices and values. Choices must be made and weighed based on the scale of 'our' rather than 'my.' "Somebody else has to occupy that space within you that was you all this time. If you do not let this happen, there is no love, only calculation."
In discussing Shiva, a Hindu deity widely regarded as the most powerful god in Hinduism, Sadhguru says:
When we say "Shiva is a destroyer," we are saying he is a compulsive lover. He destroys you; if he does not destroy you, it is not a genuine love affair. When we say "destroy you," it does not mean destroy your home or your business or your body. When what you call "myself" is your rigid personality, and it is destroyed in the process of loving, that is self-annihilation.
So, the notion that love kills - that you must annihilate part of yourself to love someone else - is not a negative notion. Sadhguru says that love is a force that destroys your rigidity and makes you flexible.
When there is no love, people are rigid. But when you really love somebody, you are willing to surrender everything -- your personality, your likes, your dislikes. Suddenly, when you fall in love, you are willing to twist yourself any way you need to, which is a fantastic spiritual process because you are becoming flexible, you could even attempt yoga. Love is definitely self-annihilating; that is the most beautiful part of it.
The author of the piece points out that love, to a certain extent, must be reasonable. It must be an arrangement from which both people benefit and if one party becomes unreasonably demanding, the other may back away.
If you love a man, woman, child or whomever, it is not just you who gets entangled in the process of loving; the other person also gets entangled. Once the entanglement is mutual, you cannot release yourself until you grow out of it. But devotion is love unreasonable. There is no reason -- it is one-sided madness.
While Sadhguru was speaking of the love of and devotion to a lover and applying/contrasting those concepts to embrace their applicability to devotion to a deity, I considered them in the context of - you guessed it - love between partners in a very earthly sense. There is much truth in the teacher's words.
In romance novels and in real life, women are quicker to recognize love and are much more eager to embrace its complications and implications. Men don't see it as fast because they don't want to see it. Love, to a bachelor, is about as welcome as fungus. In romance novels, all emotion is magnified many fold - certainly in my books it is - because not only is the view better from over-the-top, but the trip is a billion times more fun. So the hero in romances will often be the uber-bachelor, the bachelor's bachelor. It'll take him a lot longer to recognize in himself what he's disdained so often in others.
It doesn't take real-life men or romance novel heroes any time a'tall to see that love kills. They know it as instinctively as women know that after death comes the healing. Romance novel heroes don't see anything past love except the death of their freedom to answer to no-one, to consider no-one and to compromise with no-one. Worst of all, romance heroes know that after love comes marriage: the ceremony where the hero must admit to the world that he's become another casualty of love.
The battle to drag a hero from bachelor to husband (or at least betrothed), lies at the heart of every romance novel. Yes, there will be other complications - their families are feuding, she's his best friend's sister or he's her sister's suitor, or perhaps both - and there are killers or jealous ex-lovers on their trail. We romance authors do love building an Olympic triathlon-sized trail of obstacles now, don't we? And yet, in reality, the reason readers read is that basic battle, the one Sadhguru discusses, the one designed by nature and mirrored in almost every courtship ever conducted. To the extent the other complications in romance novels obscure or limit the reader's ability to become part of that emotional tug-of-war with the characters, perhaps romance authors do themselves, their readers AND the genre a huge disservice.
Readers know the struggle - they know the score and they want to sing along. Readers know that love must be acknowledged and accepted before it kills. They want to do more than watch that death - they want to experience it in all of its sorrow and joy. They want to cheer for it, edging closer to the edge of their seats as they anticipate what's coming. They know it's coming - it has to come: that moment when death is done and the healing has begun.
As Sadhguru wisely points out, some part of us must be destroyed before we can transcend. Perhaps this explains the dominance of romance over every other literary genre. When readers reach for love in their lives or their books, they're seeking that union with the universe that makes love and lovers part of nature's battle and triumphs -- rendering them immortal, like the force that's as eternal as time.