Love stories surround us. Popular songs, love movies, romance novels, grocery store tabloids all sell “love.” However, these star-studded dramas, full of reckless and chaotic emotions, do they really portray their ways? Passion and possessiveness, jealousy and infatuation: can they be love? Doesn’t this really reduce the expansive love of the Spirit to the covetous desires of the ephemeral flesh?

To truly love, we must discard common notions, dispense with the appearances of love, and discover where true love lives. Then we will find that although true love is freedom, the popular styles of love are golden bondage. I know this from my own experience: When I first fell in love at nineteen, every time my lover left me in India to return to the United States, something ripped from my body.

I walked in a daze for months, bumping into walls and tripping over curbs. In those rare moments when I wasn’t obsessing over my beloved, my thoughts were confused and my actions weak. For four years, I wrote her at least one letter a day, filling it with poetry and romantic thoughts from my heart. He needed to love her, and he needed her love in return for her; only then did I feel complete. People thought of me as a romantic: passionate, caring, and wonderful. But this intense need, this desperate desire, was nothing wonderful! It was sheer helplessness.

The emotional frenzy called love is completely alien to true love, the liberating, non-possessive embrace of another. When we truly love, there are no attachments. We do not expect anything in return. Love is only joy.

What is this rare kind of love? How do we find it? Are we ready for it? Isn’t it easier to just dismiss this as New Age fuss and go back to familiar mediocrity, back to the way things were, to passion and pain, love and frustration, desire and despair? However, when we pause, when we listen deeply, our heart tells us that we are tired of the old game, that there is so much more.

Aadil Palkhivala Copyright 2008