What is love, in my book? It is not the sentiment I feel about another person. It is not the expression of that sentiment. That is all about my feeling and expression: that ‘love’ is about me. Unless there is an established reciprocal relationship of expressions of attachment, affection, or love—and there might be one such relationship in one’s life—I do not go around telling people I love them in order to force them to reciprocate, and I do not tell them that God loves them in order to revel in the role of purveyor of God’s love or generator of others’ comfort in God. I used to try to elicit reciprocation in order to establish a relationship of mutual flattery, of mutual expressions of specialness, to produce a particular form of emotional drunkenness. That is not love: it is addiction. Sentimental love can be healthy: when I merely recognise the wonder of someone else, as an entirely anonymous observer with no investment in recognition or reciprocation of my wonder, I am on solid ground. If the feeling is of the same order as appreciating a landscape or a piece of music, then it is usually safe—unless the piece of music is there to elicit or amplify pre-existing pulses of self-centred emotion. Bach is usually safe—most love songs and country songs, not.
As soon as I want recognition or reciprocation from the person I think I love, I am not loving, I am trading. I am for sale. When I am telling people I love them or care about them, I am consumed with myself, and I cannot see them at all. The person I think I love is an avatar with little or no relation to the actual person. It is particularly insulting because it says: I cannot see you but I love the idea I made up of you. The other person instinctively knows, in that moment, that they are invisible to me, and they back off, quite rightly. People recognise the case of mistaken identity. In that ‘loving’ condition, I am not interested in whether or not they wish to be told they are loved or cared about (most people in my experience do not): I am interested only in building my castle in the air and encouraging the other person to move into it with me.
Sometimes this desire to be ‘loved’ switches its object from a person to God. This at least saves me from revolting entanglements with others but does not spring me from the trap of dependence on sentiment. Dependence on God does not mean dependence on the notion of an emotional bond with God. It means trusting in providence and relying on direction. In that transference of object of my sentiment, I have merely substituted. I have not transcended the problem, just relocated it. I am no less dependent and I am no less consumed with myself. If I need God to love me in a sentimental sense, I am on the wrong track. That is not how that relationship works, in my experience.
So, that is what love is not: what is it? To wish someone well and to act in their benefit, without force. This means giving people space, tolerating them as they are, not trying to fix, change, control, direct, redirect, or manipulate, being of help where suitable, and quietly letting them decide if and how I am to be in their life. It means ‘your turn, my turn’. It means specifically not crossing the border and planting the love flag on their territory, in order to claim it as my own. It largely means leaving them alone.