Somebody To Love

From Menletter August 2011

By Tim Baehr

Rumi, the 13th-Century Sufi and ecstatic poet, said:

No better love than love with no object. . . .

This is crazy stuff. How can we love without somebody to love? We long for the ideal woman to love. We may spend years looking for her, or fall accidentally and crazily under the spell of someone we're sure is The One.

Queen seems to have gotten it right:

Can anybody find me somebody to love?

Each morning I get up I die a little

Can barely stand on my feet

Take a look in the mirror and cry

Lord what you're doing to me

I have spent all my years in believing you

But I just can't get no relief, Lord!

Somebody, somebody

Can anybody find me somebody to love?

And Jefferson Airplane:

Don't you want somebody to love

Don't you need somebody to love

Wouldn't you love somebody to love

You better find somebody to love

And even (pre)-teen throb Justin Bieber:

I need somebody

I, I need somebody

I need somebody

I, I need somebody to love

Okay, we can dismiss Rumi as a mystic who used his poetry as a metaphor for seeking union with the divine: "love with no object" is of course possible only on the spiritual plane.

But back here on Earth, questions arise about non-metaphorical love and love objects: Is it the object that creates the love? If love makes us blind to another person's flaws, is it possible that love creates the object - that is, turns the love object into an ideal being?

Let's try expanding this whole conversation beyond the boy-girl or boy-boy stuff. We're always looking for some ideal - the ideal lover, the ideal job, the ideal car, the ideal home, and on and on.

A few things can happen:

1. We search and search, and no one (or nothing) satisfies the ideal. Often we don't know exactly what we're looking for - "I'll know it when I see it." Or we've adopted an ideal from media sources, our parents and teachers, and the like. We end up with nothing, and we go ahead vaguely (or sharply) unsatisfied.

2. We search and search and finally settle for less-than-ideal, we go ahead vaguely (or sharply) unsatisfied.

3. We find a person, object, job, etc., and project onto it our abstract ideals, seeing fine qualities that aren't really there and ignoring negative qualities or telling ourselves they aren't important or will change. Eventually we see the truth, and we go ahead (or sharply) unsatisfied.

Wait - maybe the 800-year-old mystic in the room was onto something: "No better love than love with no object." Inside our love for any person or object, there must be a capacity to love in the first place. Our love does not depend on the existence of a suitable object, and the existence of the object does not depend on our loving it.

Where does this capacity, this love with no object, come from? I think it develops through observation of ourselves and our world, and of engagement with both, sometimes over a long time. Even for mundane activities like buying a car or choosing a job, if we know nothing about our self or about cars or jobs, how can we know which car or job will delight (or even satisfy) that self? I suspect that a lot of us guys engage in a lot more internal and external observation in selecting a car or job than in choosing a mate. Of course, the latter is far, far more complex.

This brings up two problems in the realm of intimate relationships: Are young people incapable of true love because they're inexperienced in observation and engagement? And does this mean that the initial spark of infatuation and fascination is always false?

No, and no. Observation and engagement, and learning from them, involve paying attention to life, including following the sparks to see what happens. Age is not a guarantee of wisdom and discernment, and it is far less important than paying attention. We all know young men who are wise beyond their years, and older men who have never paid attention and have no idea of who they are.

Infatuation and fascination are phenomena in themselves, neither true nor false, but not to be taken lightly. It's hard to distinguish them from love, and it can be hard to see beforehand which spark will turn to love and which will burn itself out (or burn down our psychic village).

If we're lucky, we can look back someday and share Nat King Cole's sentiment: "Fascination turned to love." And then the challenge is to nurture the love and help it grow. But that's a topic for another time.