In our most recent Gathering Gold episode, Victoria and I unpacked a beautiful piece of writing by David Whyte that one of our recent retreat participants brought to a post-retreat Zoom gathering. The piece begins with the line: “Unrequited love is the love human beings experience most of the time.” The full episode can be found here. What follows are excerpts from the episode, and some writing that didn’t find its way into the podcast.

What I love about David Whyte’s piece is how he takes the topic of unrequited love out of only the realm of romantic love. We’re all familiar with the theme of the chase that dominates the storytelling in mainstream culture; it’s entirely based on equating love with longing. If the object of your affection or desire is just out of reach – maybe giving you something but not everything – we often call that feeling “being in love.” We’re so deeply wired to equate being in love with longing, which is essentially the definition of unrequited love, that we in the West have a hard time recognizing what Robert Johnson calls “oatmeal love” as being as good and rare as it is.

In one of my favorite books, “We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love,” Robert Johnson writes:

“So much of our lives is spent in a longing and a search – for what, we do not know. So many of our ostensible “goals”, so many of the things we think we want, turn out to be the masks behind which our real desires hide; they are symbols for the actual values and qualities for which we hunger. They are not reducible to physical or material things, not even to a physical person; they are psychological qualities: love, truth, honesty, loyalty, purpose – something we can feel is noble, precious, and worthy of our devotion. We try to reduce all this to something physical – a house, a car, a better job, or a human being – but it doesn’t work. Without realizing it, we are searching for the Sacred. And the sacred is not reducible to anything else.”

“Something is Missing”: The Longing for Wholeness

If we dare to remove unrequited love from the realm of romantic love and recognize that the longing we have for that feeling of being in love has replaced what was traditionally a longing for the divine, the conversation starts to move in a more interesting and fruitful direction. What I mean is that romantic love comes down to right size when we stop asking it to serve the role that religion once played. It is entirely possible that we were never meant to fall in love in that all-consuming way with another human being – at least not forever.

We can fall in love, but when we come down to earth we must recognize that the normalcy of everyday life doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the relationship, and that we can’t expect our partner to be a god or goddess. We can allow them to be human with human flaws, and if they also take back the projection that we’re supposed to be a muse or a goddess we can get on with the business of just being two humans together learning about the art of loving.

But as I started with, David Whyte isn’t only talking about romantic love in this piece. He’s talking about the love between a parent and child, between friends, maybe even between neighbors, and then finally, the love with God or the divine. That first line just catches you in the heart: “Unrequited love is the love human beings experience most of the time.”

Why?

Because from the moment we’re born we go from the divine bliss of oneness to separateness. In that very moment we experience unrequited love, a sense that something is missing.

And it continues as the baby gets older because even the most loving mother will never be able to meet all her child’s needs. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t love her baby with her entire being, but the baby might not feel that perfect love because there will be times when their needs can’t be met. A baby will be too cold or too hot, hungry or too full, lonely, sad, scared. It’s part of being human to learn how to tolerate the messiness, but as the child grows they will inevitably, at some point, realize that there are gaps in the loving, there’s something missing, because it’s part of our human experience to have something missing, to feel some sense of existential loneliness or existential incompleteness.

“A Beautiful Temporary”

I’ve often written about the highly highly sensitive person with OCD who is acutely, painfully aware that the world is incomplete, and this can show up in the “just right” theme of OCD where they’re trying to get their outer world just right – this penny has to line up in perfect symmetry with that book, or I have to close the door three times in this certain way. It’s like their soul itches and they misguidedly believe if they can scratch it in just the right way by arranging the outer world just so, they’ll find wholeness and then relief.

Of course, it never works. There is no amount of arranging in the outer world that will create the inner wholeness we seek. And in fact, there’s no amount of anything that will create that permanent state of wholeness because I don’t think it exists in human form. We are born in separateness and we will die in separateness. Along the way we can experience deep connection with other humans and animals and the natural world, but it doesn’t sustain. It’s not supposed to sustain. As David Whyte writes, “Requited love may happen, but it is a beautiful temporary, a seasonal blessing, the aligning of stars not too often in the same quarter of the heavens, an astonishing blessing.”

When we accept that there’s an element of brokenness in the world, a piece that will never be complete, we might stop trying to stitch together the tears in an attempt to create an unbroken cloth. Or maybe we don’t stop, because maybe that’s also part of our human experience: to taste acceptance of imperfection or loneliness or incompleteness and then forget what that tastes like and resume our quest to scratch the spiritual itch.

For other people, the quest is focused on romantic love: if I can find my perfect other, my soulmate, my ideal, I will find completion. This hole in my soul will be filled in. People can spend their entire lives seeking that perfect someone and come up empty because it simply doesn’t exist in this world. As Whyte says, “What other human being could ever love us as we need to be loved?” We think if we find our physical ideal or the partner who meets our need for deep conversation we’ll feel loved in the way we need to be loved and the existential emptiness or loneliness will disappear. But it never happens. It’s not the plan here on Earth, as I understand it. It happens in moments, which is the beautiful temporary of requited love, but it’s not how we experience life most of the time.

Falling In and Out of Love with the Divine

So we can say: If I’m not meant to find perfect love with a parent or partner, am I meant to find it with God? I used to think so.

I used to believe that it was possible to be in perfect union with the divine and that was the solution to our problem of separateness – that’s the true remedy for longing. And I still believe this to a point. I believe that when we can channel the need for bliss that we mistakenly assign to other humans onto our relationship with the divine flow of the world – whether that’s through our relationship to nature or creativity or in meditation or yoga or dance – we can taste that ecstatic, joyful place.

But it’s not a sustainable place. We fall in and out of connection with the divine just like we fall in and out of connection with a partner or a friend or a child. We taste these blissful places – we fall in love for a period of time – but then we fall out of love. This can happen multiple times a day in all of our relationships, including our relationship with the divine. It’s so painful to fall out of love or intimate connection.

I’ve talked about this pain I sometimes feel with the natural world, especially in the particularly vibrant seasons of spring and autumn, where I can’t quite merge in the way I long to merge. There’s a feeling of being inside of the beauty and then on the outside which creates longing. I’m starting to believe then instead of expecting to be in a constant state of connection part of our task is to love the longing, to see the wisdom of longing not as something to fix or fill but to meet and accompany.

Requited Love

We tasted requited love at the Another Way retreat in June. We had five days of belonging and connection and reciprocated love. It was beautiful beyond words. And then we knew that it was time to come home and bring this template back into our daily lives – not to try to replicate it necessarily but to draw from it, the way we can draw from the peak experiences in life, like a wedding day. The love is revealed, and we can dip our cup into that well when we need to remember what perfect, requited love feels like.

And maybe when we keep deepening that well, when the waters run deeper and deeper as we grow all of our relationships in life, including our relationship to ourselves and the divine, in our later years we can access it more readily. This is what I’ve experienced as I’ve gotten older: a trust in the healthy relationships which also allows me to accept the less healthy ones with more grace. I don’t need people to be more than they can be. I don’t expect one person to fulfill all my needs. I don’t expect my relationship with the divine to be consistently open and joyful and connected. I’m very much working on all of this, but this is what I’ve noticed.