Loving in Freedom

II. FLEXIBILITY ..................................................................................44

III. SECURITY......................................................................................46

IV. OBLIGATION.................................................................................47

V. CONCLUSION ...............................................................................48

VI. PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT.........................................................48

    How strange it seems that love,
which should be the most free and voluntary of all human relationships,
so often becomes a means of security and a source of obligation.
Why does love so easily degenerate into patterns, habits, rights, duties,
responsibilities, obligations, burdens, demands, and possessiveness?

    Perhaps love turns into clinging dependence
when we are insecure within ourselves
—lonely, inadequate, needy, deficient at our deepest levels of being.
Maybe we become possessive when we cannot stand alone.

I. CHOICE

    Ideally, our love should be a completely free choice from both sides,
a voluntary commitment, renewable as often as we please.
Romance obscures choice by talking of "falling in love",
as if love "just happens" to us without our will or consent
—Cupid's arrows let loose at random.
But if we have outgrown such romantic fantasies,
we accept responsibility for creating the relationship between us.

    Perhaps we notice prior hopes and sexual attraction,
but such emotional needs and sex-appeal make poor bases for love.
Rather, our love grows out of the persons we choose to be,
emerges from the sharing of our Authentic projects-of-being
—what we are fundamentally trying to do with our lives.

     For us to love freely and creatively
means to renew our commitment and hence our relationship every day.
As we become more Authentic, we grow and change;
and our unique relationship will change along with us.
Our love is an active, evolving process;
if we cease to re-create our love, it slips silently away.
If we see ourselves as "having a stable relationship",
we might be taking each other for granted.
And especially if we are married, we might be assuming
that the institution of marriage will carry on for us
without any special effort on our part.

     But love has no substance or momentum of its own.
Love is only whatever relationship we have created between us today.
If today we are not actively sharing our deepest selves,
our relationship has already begun to fade.
No special action is required; love disappears when we stop creating it.
Love does not keep going by itself once we "get the ball rolling".

     Our love is a unique creation of the two of us.
If we are becoming more Authentic, love does not arise
from biological urges overwhelming us
nor from cultural traditions possessing us
nor from supernatural powers using us as their playthings.
Both of us are free persons, continually re-inventing ourselves.
And in this phase of our lives, we are writing our stories together.
Each morning we must reaffirm our projects-of-being.
Our projects cannot re-start themselves.
We must bring them back to life—or let they die away with yesterday.

     Love is one of these ever-fresh projects.
Today we must love in a new way if we are growing persons.
Yesterday can add little to what is happening between us today.
We might have pleasant memories, but memories alone are not enough.
Sad would our relationship be if we had only beautiful memories.

     To the degree that we are growing, creative persons,
our love is full of surprises rather than governed by expectations.
If we find ourselves in the rut of customary activities,
then we know that freedom and flexibility have disappeared.
For instance, if we always share certain meals or always sleep together,
then the openness of our early love has been replaced by patterns,
which might become expectations,
which might in turn become obligations, or even burdens.
Love may only be freely given, not expected or demanded.
Demands yield not love but duty—perhaps unwilling duty.