The English word “love” is used to convey so many different emotions that it’s amazing that we can communicate with each other! We can love chocolate cake, our dog, our mother, our new shoes, God, or our boyfriend. So, what’s the difference?
According to the Buddhist model of the mind there are three main categories of states of mind: positive, negative, and neutral – these are technical terms, not moralistic ones. By definition, the positive ones, the virtues, are altruistic; they’re necessarily related to others. “Love” in this context is defined as “the wish that another be happy”; it’s a delight in someone’s happiness.
So, right there, we can see that “love” of chocolate cake or shoes is hardly the right word. Nor is it accurate for someone who has a relationship with a creator. We need different words for both of these.
This definition of love is best used in relation to our mother, our sister, our friends. But what about our boyfriend? Yes, we want him to be happy, but what else is going on?
Being “in love” with our boyfriend, we have “attachment”, “desire”, “craving,” or in its strongest expressions, “lust” for him. And this is when it gets tricky. Our wish for him to be happy, our genuine love, in other words, gets completely confused when it’s mixed with attachment: we can’t tell one from another.
The Buddhist take on this simple word attachment goes pretty deep. It’s multi-faceted. Its energy is dissatisfaction and it’s simply there all the time, driving us to find things or events or people to fulfill our needs.
First, it’s an assumption that I must get what I want every second. Then, when this attachment finds what it wants – the boy, for example – it causes him to look way more delicious than he really is, which, in turn, triggers lots of excitement and extremely good feelings in the body. Then we manipulate to get him, possess him as our own, and have massive expectations that he will fulfill my every need. By now, attachment has built up this huge fantasy. We’ve practically written a novel in our head about him and our next fifty years together!
And all of this happens spontaneously. Buddhism says we come fully programmed with this from the first second of conception in our mother’s womb, simply because we’ve practiced it to perfection in countless past lives and brought it with us.
So, what’s the problem with this attachment? The key point about it and all the other negative states of mind that stem from it – anger, which is the response when attachment doesn’t get what it wants; jealousy, low self-esteem, arrogance, etc., etc. – is that it’s delusional; its not an accurate assessment of reality; it distorts things. Therefore it causes suffering. It’s a perilous state of mind.
This is difficult to see, especially because attachment triggers such good feelings. In fact, it seems cruel to even call it “negative”, which in Buddhism is merely referring to a state of mind that isn’t realistic and therefore causes pain and, in turn, causes us to harm others.
We need to analyze this, and then we can begin to distinguish between the altruistic state of mind called love and the delusion called attachment.
Initially it’s impossible to see how attachment causes suffering. But we can see it nakedly when it doesn’t get what it wants; when the bubble bursts; when the fighting starts, the jealousy, the pain, the loss. Attachment is at the root of them all.
In fact, if we didn’t have attachment, we couldn’t possibly have anger or depression or low self-esteem or jealousy: this is very sobering to contemplate.
Of course, we don’t need to give up our beloveds. When we’ve really worked deeply on our minds and can distinguish between attachment and love, even a little, then we can begin to get the best of both worlds, have our cake and eat it too!
So, we do our best. Never give up wanting someone to be happy, loving them in other words, even when they don’t do what my attachment wants. That’s the key to success of a good, healthy relationship.