Anyone who has loved long enough, truly, deeply, and to the core, is very likely to have faced the feeling of absence, of emptiness, and when looking at the person who was their love (and even if they don’t feel it, they most likely is that it continues to be) perceives the obvious feeling that everything has passed: “I no longer feel the same”; perhaps even “I don’t feel anything anymore.”
It is a certainty that can cause perplexity, vertigo, and the feeling of being on the edge of the precipice and not seeing the bottom.
At that moment the desire to flee, to abandon everything (and abandon him) can be pressing, it can present itself as the only way out.
But what is this feeling due to? Is it the end of love?
It is evident to me that this certainty of an absence of feeling is the same thing that the greatest lovers, the mystics, call the dark night; and I am convinced that its origin and its purpose are the same as in the case of mystical love: to purify love.
As Javier Vidal-Quadras explains in his magnificent book “After Loving You I Will Love You”, at the beginning of love, in what we call falling in love, it happens that we live from the feeling: “Isn’t it true that sometimes you felt in love with being in love? ”.
Falling in love provokes such intense feelings that it can focus the lover more on its own sensations (and, therefore, on itself) than on that of its loved one. As Sam Cooke’s wonderfully romantic song goes: “I love you for sentimental reasons.”
But after a reasonable amount of time, these feelings must be tempered, it is good to stop having the emotion on the surface, the one that makes us feel so good that, in reality, we do not even need to be with the loved one to feel that way.
And there may come a time when not only do we no longer feel the same, but we truly feel nothing. Maybe the void.
There begins the purification of love. That is when we can begin to love the other, not for what it provokes in us, but solely for who the other is. Because it is
And that’s enough.
It is enough not to feel the same as at the beginning, and better yet, not to feel anything.
Look at the other and think: “Why did I get married?”
And realize that the only answer is: “because of who it is.”
You don’t need more. In love, in true love, you don’t matter. If you feel, good and if not, also.
It is necessary to pass that phase that allows you to demonstrate who you are.
This is how Rudyard Kipling expressed it:
“If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew,
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
and so hold on when there is nothing in you
because you desire it, and you want it, and you command it.”
Who’s in charge here, your feelings or you?
It’s knowing that my life is yours.
When you allow yourself to immerse yourself in that night of love, in that darkness of feelings, that is when mature love can appear.
Love has not died. Can not. Just hide the feeling so you can love for the sake of loving, without needing to feel anything. Without you caring.
And when the dark night hurts the most, when its closeness even leads to such desires to distance yourself that make you doubt who you are and who that person is next to you, that is when you can come to intuit the answer: it is my love. It is my beloved.
And you look at it, and you realize that EVERYTHING makes sense. Your life has meaning, and the meaning is it.
Then the feeling no longer depends on it’s smile, nor on it’s caresses, nor on it realizing that you have done this or that, it no longer depends on anything.
You don’t need to feel anything to know that your state is being in love.
The absence of feeling purifies love.
Saint Therese of Liseaux, who suffered a profound darkness in her love, explains it in a very simple way (as she is) to her spiritual brother, the Abbé Bellière, after a phase in which he himself had to sort out the doubts of his heart : «Now that the storm has passed, I thank God for having made it pass through, because we read in the Holy Books these beautiful words: “Blessed is the man who has suffered temptation” (James, 1, 12), and also: “He who has not been tempted, what does he know? (Ecclesiasticus, 34, 10)”» (Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus of the Holy Face, letter 177, to Abbé Bellière, October 21, 1896).
But if the 18th century is called the Age of Enlightenment, due to the primacy of reason and knowledge, the 21st century will be known as the Century of Feelings.
They pretend that our feelings determine even what we are (we are what we feel). And if I don’t feel anything…
Reducing love to feeling, reducing the human being to it’s feelings, is to sever it’s essence, leaving it in an absolute state of immaturity and defenselessness. Incapable of looking, of searching beyond itself.
It really is making you incapable of love.
If spouses allowed themselves to immerse themselves in the dark night… if they allowed themselves to come to love without needing to feel anything… each one could mature, their love could reach authentic ecstasy and experience what it means to love the other, simply because it is.
And the world would live completely in love.
