Love That Raises Us Out of the Everyday

Novelist Lisa See has written, “All women on earth-- and men, too for that matter-- hope for the kind of love that transforms us, raises us up out of the everyday, and gives us the courage to survive our little deaths—the heartache of unfulfilled dreams, of career and personal disappointments, of broken love affairs.”

Transformative love. It is possible to know, to experience, and to share.

We often look for it in romantic relationships. We all want that. A relationship with someone we truly connect with. Someone we grow to respect and cherish. Someone gentle and kind, affectionate and loving. Someone who makes us laugh out loud, whose joy in life we share, whose depths we understand.

Transformative love gives us access to something undeniable, something solid and foundational. In the person we find this with, we find what we have always wanted to be true about human beings. They meet our longings, our desires, our needs—with intelligence, wittiness, humor, passion, tenderness, and competency. They are perceptive and wise. They don’t scold or judge. They listen. They empathize. They know us.

It is, of course, a two-way transaction. If they are not getting the same kind of love from us, they eventually wither from boredom, stagnation, emotional and physical deprivation. Intimacy is not built on sex. Sex, if it’s any good at all, is built on intimacy. And intimacy is for the long haul. It grows in time and delivers with allure, intensity, beauty, and comfort.

While traveling last week I observed couples in the airport. Couples of all ages. Some sat there looking at their phones without ever looking up or saying a word. Some stared off into space looking away from each other. And some leaned in to talk, to listen, to smile and laugh with each other.

As people walked the terminal I saw couples where the man was 5 steps ahead of the woman. I saw couples holding hands. Some were chatting. Some had their arms around each other.

We may think transformative love is silly, or some fictional thing found only in movies and books. But it can be shared. It can be known. To be sure, most of us have had our hearts broken, our egos shattered; we have been left feeling duped, or betrayed, or swindled, because love didn’t work out for us. The only thing transformative about it was the crushing hurt or the angry regrets.

Writers at The School of Life have mused, “Episodes of unrequited love force us to develop a sense of humor about ourselves. It is impossible to think too well of who we are in their aftermath. Unrequited love edges us inevitably towards a basic humility. We are at last confirmed as truly ridiculous.”

Yes. Good word. I have been there. Probably you have, too.

We can wallow in our pain, our disappointment, or we can take the longer look and see what it was all about. That distance usually gives us a chance to lighten up, stop taking ourselves so seriously, and head on down the road to where transformative love still waits with someone amazing.

Relationships are hard. Living together in our differences, in our wounds, in our varying interests, can at times be drudgery. No relationship, even those gifted with transformative love, is without testing times and the drain of life’s routines.

But, though I am still looking myself, I am convinced there can be fascination, endearment, warmth, friendship, and deep love, between two people who have opened their lives to one another.

If that is not transformative, little else is.

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The Unclad Soul

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