How can we distinguish between love and attachment? Because they’re tremendously different, but we conflate them, you know? We really do think they’re the same!
Let’s look at the difference between them. As we say in England and Australia, they’re like chalk and cheese: they look the same, but they’re completely different. It doesn’t say much about our cheese, does it!
Attachment is in the neurotic, deluded category of states of mind, and love is in the valid, virtuous category, but our trouble is when we use the word “love” we mean attachment.
We say we’re “in love.” What we mean by that is demented, berserk, out-of-control attachment. It brings lots of pleasure, it’s true – and nothing wrong with pleasure! – but like with the chocolate cake it won’t last. But we don’t want to know about that!
All of our emotional states of mind are rooted in, based on conceptuality: attachment and anger and jealousy and all the painful ones, as well as love and compassion and the other virtues.
Jealousy, anger, attachment – they’re all conceptual states of mind in their bare bones, and then by practicing and believing in those misconceptions, those stories, over many lifetimes, we then build them up, build them up, and they become emotional – and then even the body feels them, you know? They’re so primordial, so second-nature, so instinctive.
Attachment, the definition is a conceptual state of mind that exaggerates the deliciousness of the object. Now that we get! But it’s got all these other characteristics like we talk: it’s got the emotional hunger, it’s got the dissatisfaction.
The energy of attachment is dissatisfaction – “I’m just not enough, I don’t have enough” – that brings the emotional hunger to find something, and then you manipulate to get it, and then all the anticipation and build up to getting it. And when it comes to things and people, we then possess them, assume they’re mine. Possessiveness is a massive component of attachment, and it’s frantic: the fear of losing the person is unbearable.
You’ve got the boyfriend, you’re in love – which means you’ve got masses of attachment: the karmic connection is there from the past, it’s a close feeling, a close connection.
But also you do love him, you can’t say you don’t. You really do want him to be happy: that’s the definition of love. You definitely want him to be happy – that’s the love piece. Attachment makes him look divine, and that’s the emotional hunger: you’re looking every second to make sure he loves you and he’s saying all the nice words and doing everything attachment wants. That’s right alongside the love, and we assume they’re the same, but they’re totally different.
The stronger the attachment is – the emotional hunger, the self-centeredness, the fear – the more that pollutes the love and drags the love down, and your love becomes completely contingent. The minute he doesn’t look at you properly, you’re panicking: “He doesn’t love me anymore, oh my God, what have I done wrong?” And so you go back and forth like a yo-yo, crazy. Or then you hate him, you wish he’d go, you hate the sight of him.
The more love and compassion you have, and the more patience and generosity and forgiveness, and the less attachment, the better the relationship. And you might even have better sex because you’ll be more happy, you’ll be more generous, you’ll be more loving, be less greedy, less neurotic!
Attachment is self-centered, it’s I-based, it’s fear-based, it’s limited, it’s needy, it’s emotional, it’s neurotic. Emotional is fine – love and affection, they’re emotional too – but attachment is a neurotic emotion. Attachment and love are completely different.
It’s so important right at the beginning of a relationship – especially when it’s an intense relationship and the attachment’s so raw, and it’s so easy to love this person, to want them to be happy – to learn to identify the attachment and the love, to see the difference between them.
Then of course as you progress in the relationship – if it progresses, and doesn’t degenerate into rage and despair and the rest of the nightmare, like so many do – then you learn to work with the attachment. That’s what patience is, and perseverance, and not believing your own dramas, you know?
Love is, “May you be happy, may you be happy, and then what can I do to make you happy?” But the trouble with this one is it’s so dependent at the moment on our attachment that, if you’re the good-girl kind, you’ll end up oh-so-kind, oh-s0-loving, doing everything for them – and then you’ll wonder why you get used like a doormat. It’s because all of this is driven by the need to be seen as a good girl. That’s the worst attachment of all!
The deepest attachment is the need to be seen and heard, to be seen as a good person, to be validated by others. So if our being loving and kind is driven by that, it’ll be a disaster. It’s very tricky because it’s so subtle in us, and it’s so automatic since we’re little girls, you know?
We’ve really got to have this awareness – and you can’t force it. It’s got to come every day, learning to have this discrimination between these different states of mind, and identifying. That’s practice every day, “being your own therapist,” as Lama Yeshe puts it. It’s not an easy job.
So learn to distinguish between attachment and love, and then to see the difference, to see the difference. And then learn to know how to argue with the attachment, calm it down, and how to grow the love and the patience and the kindness. “We can mold our mind,” Lama Zopa says, “into any shape we like.” We have to know that.