When was the last time you felt whole?

And if you can pinpoint it, why did you feel it?

Was it after you made a breakthrough on a project?

Was it a sunset, some force of nature?

Was it love?

The thing about love is that it can make you feel completely whole and then completely empty. You want it so badly but then you get a hold of it and it cuts to the core of your being. It grips you with a hint of distrust for years and then all at once lets go and you’re free falling.

You feel this way because of a failure to make the distinction between what the psychologist Robert Johnson calls romantic love and real love. It’s easy to get confused by the idea of love. He says that we have become “possessed and dominated by a set of beliefs that we, as individuals, never chose. It is as though we breathed them in from novels and movies, from the psychological air around us.”

It’s like in You’ve Got Mail when Joe (Tom Hanks) tells his dad he’s got to find the one person in the world who fills his heart with joy. The ONE PERSON. That’s a lot of pressure. That’s a big idea. That’s romantic love.

Real love is the boring mundane stuff. It’s seeing people for who they really are, not what we want them to be or wish they would be. It’s recognizing that lots of people can and should fill your heart with joy. It’s hearing the whole orchestra, not fixating on one instrument.

But this idea of love, romantic love, is actually very useful. Humans are drawn to it for a reason. It’s why we love stories. Myths and fantasies have been passed down for millennia instilling the idea of romantic love into our consciousness.

Johnson writes:

“In its [romantic love] purest form it is an ideal of great power, and contained within every such ideal is profound reality. They are not only ideals, they are windows on our souls that tell of a practical and living reality within us, something we can live and be. We may misunderstand the truth behind the ideal; we may try to live it on the wrong level or to put it in the wrong place; but the truth is there to enrich us and move us closer to wholeness.”

Each story of romantic love, personal or fictional, is a window. One that we can open and expose more of our inner world, uncovering more of the reality of things. Exposing the forces that are at play, getting closer to that feeling of wholeness.

Talk to you next week,
Dawson