Surrender, Love, and Happiness

27 April, 2026

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27 February, 2026

18 min

Surrender, Love, and Happiness

Man, a Being for Love and Surrender

We now link back to the beginning of this series of articles , when I distinguished man from animals, precisely with regard to love.

But, after what we have studied about delivery, these differences are very highlighted, as we will soon see.

1. Animals do not love

Once it becomes clear that self-giving is the essential culmination of true love, inextricably linked to it, it also becomes evident that, unlike people, animals do not love, they cannot love.

If we use the word love in its truest sense, talking about love between them is just a poor metaphor or a fallacy, a kind of deception.

Strictly speaking,
no animal loves (or gives itself up).

They do not love because they cannot give themselves.

The underlying reason can be glimpsed intuitively, although it is not simple (so I ask the reader not to worry if they do not fully understand this section: they can easily move on to the next one or the one after that or the one after that…).

It could be summarized as follows:

Commitment is the ultimate element of love.
The animal cannot love because it cannot surrender itself.
And he is ultimately unable to do so because he does not belong to himself, because he is not his own master.

The animal cannot surrender
because it is not its own master.

He cannot surrender because he is not “master of himself”

What does it mean to “not belong to oneself” or “not be one’s own master”?

Simply put, any animal is part of the species to which it —now, indeed— belongs.
That the being of animals and plants, as well as that of inert realities, must be conceived as a simple portion or fragment of a larger whole.
Like a kind of ecological loan—if we may use this metaphor—that arises from matter for a certain time, and later disappears, without leaving any truly individual trace.

Strictly speaking,
the animal is a “part” of its species
and, in that sense, “belongs” to its species.

It does not have a being “owned”

Or, to approach it from another perspective, which I have also alluded to.

As we know and as geneticists explain, each animal only makes sense in relation to its species, of which it is a mere example.
- It is intended to reproduce it and maintain it over time, giving life, in turn, to other specimens of the same species.
From this point of view, as I have just mentioned, it is part of the species, to which it ultimately belongs.
- Or, looking at it from the other extreme, it does not belong to itself, it does not have a being of its own.

Each animal does not have its own being,
but rather, so to speak, forms part
of the group of its species.

And nobody gives what they don’t have

But, as we well know and have heard so many times, nobody gives what they don’t have.
Consequently, by not possessing itself, by not having control over itself, by not having itself, the animal cannot truly surrender itself to anything or anyone .
Therefore, he is incapable of loving, if we understand this term in its truest and fullest sense, which includes self-giving.

Since no animal belongs to itself,
it can be given away for love.

2. Men and women, “made” for love and self-giving

The situation of man is different.

Man is capable of loving, until the very end, because he is capable of giving himself completely.
His being has been granted to him as private property and, consequently, he does belong to himself, he is indeed his own master.
Therefore, in the wonderful moment when he falls in love — and as he continues to fall more and more in love — he can dispose of himself and give himself to the person he loves, with a supreme act of generosity: for life and in all its dimensions, if it is conjugal love.

To the same extent that a man or a woman
are masters of themselves,
they can surrender themselves.

With two conditions (in being and in acting)

In short, the first and deepest condition of surrender is belonging to oneself, being master of one’s own being (because, as I have just recalled, nobody gives what he does not have, what he does not possess).

But to that basic and fundamental requirement is added a kind of everyday, practical, home-like demand.

And that, in daily life, that man or that woman should also be masters of themselves, of their behavior: that is, that their will prevails over their appetites and tendencies and effectively dominates them.

And this applies always. Not just in sex life, but in each and every circumstance of daily life.

In order to surrender,
it is essential to be master of oneself.

Lack of self-control prevents genuine surrender

Who is not master of themselves?

To give a close and relatively simple example, someone who cannot control their mood and state of mind.

Or, in equivalent terms, the man or woman who, in their actions, is not truly free, but depends on their physical condition, blood pressure, the weather, the absence of setbacks, the success of plans made for weekends or holidays, the ownership of certain belongings or instruments…

And it seems obvious that someone with these deficiencies will hardly be able to truly and seriously love: not possessing or controlling themselves—but rather being possessed or dominated by that set of external and internal circumstances— and lacking sufficient freedom, they will be incapable of surrendering themselves.

He who is not master of himself will hardly be able to love:
he will be incapable of surrendering himself in a real and decisive way.

And happiness as a consequence

1. Love and happiness

A being-for-love (and surrender)

And, with that lack of love, he will frustrate his own existence.

Man and woman are destined to love; that is their fundamental and constitutive “need”.
And, since love culminates in surrender, both naturally aspire to give themselves to each other, definitively.

It is not difficult to understand this intimate inclination, which would serve to define man —woman or man, woman and man— as a being-for-love.

If to love is to want the good for another, what will we aspire to give to the one we love madly?

Clearly, the best we have.
- And “that” is the person himself, who is not only a great good, but the greatest one possesses.

Well, as we know and I have just recalled, the person is the most perfect thing that exists in all of nature, the most perfect thing found in it: perfectissimum in tota natura , according to the now classic expression.

The greatest thing that a human being “has”
is that which “he is”:
his own person.

The resulting happiness

And the great paradox is that only in this way, by surrendering oneself, by forgetting oneself, by giving one’s all —in a figurative, but certain and true sense—, does the person achieve their own fullness and happiness , as we will point out from now on and I will expressly discuss later.

Man is only radically and fully man, a person, to the extent that he pursues the good of the other as other, in that he gives himself out of love.

And in that same proportion, he grows as a person and is and feels happy, blissful, without seeking it at all (even more so, on the condition of not pursuing it).

Love and devotion bring,
as a necessary consequence,
happiness.

2. Love, dedication, and personal growth

Only love makes a person grow

Let’s reinforce this idea, by contrast, from the opposite extreme.

Giving is constitutive of the human subject, which allows him to be a whole, complete person.
Therefore, if they do not love to the point of self-giving, men and women do not reach their full potential as persons.
Moreover, they are dissolving, squandering the greatness of their own condition.

Some direct testimonies

Caldera states it succinctly, but clearly and decisively :

Man’s true greatness, his perfection, and therefore his mission or purpose, is love. Everything else—professional ability, prestige, wealth, lifespan, intellectual development—must converge on love or it ultimately lacks meaning.

Similarly, following in the footsteps of Frankl, and with the authority granted by many years of experience as a psychiatrist, Juan Cardona Pescador explains it:

Through love, human beings receive their ultimate qualification: depending on the nature of their love, they either achieve their existential fullness or become distorted. The choice depends on the quality and intensity of their love.
Only by giving and giving of oneself can a person truly live and attain the fullness of their free being. One becomes unnatural if one refuses to love, if one freely suppresses one’s capacity to love, thus creating the existential void of unrequited love.

Guardini’s explanation

And in a different, somewhat more difficult, but replete way, Romano Guardini explains it.

It establishes, first and foremost, the positive force of love for personal fulfillment, for one’s own development, and for the growth of any other person:
- Equally crucial to a person’s health is love […].
- He who loves walks constantly toward freedom; toward freedom from his own chains, that is, from himself. And in doing so, in stepping outside himself through insight and feeling, he attains fulfillment. The horizon opens around him, and his truest self gains space.
- Everyone who knows about love knows this law: that only by stepping outside oneself does the horizon open up, in which one’s own being becomes real and everything flourishes. In this space, authentic creation and pure action also take place, all that bears witness to the dignity of the world of being.

And, immediately, he draws out the negative consequences that follow from a lack of love and commitment:
- The sick person , as soon as they abandon love […].
- Then existence becomes a prison. Everything closes in. Things oppress us, everything becomes strange and hostile in its innermost essence, the ultimate and evident meaning disappears. Being no longer flourishes.

Only by giving one’s all through dedication
does a person achieve fulfillment
and the resulting happiness.

3. Paradox or contradiction?

Giving without losing?

To give or to give oneself… without losing: is it possible?

On many occasions, as I explain the demands of surrender, of forgetting and disappearing for the benefit of the beloved, more than one person has protested, with grace and good humor.

In short, she came to tell me that she too had her small rights to take care of herself, to be a little bit happy.

The tone of the protest has always been friendly, fun, and nuanced enough to prevent the situation from becoming tense.

However, I believe this is a relevant issue, worthy of further reflection.

The demands of surrender
work in favor of the human person,
not against him.

The “participation” of love

Let’s try to understand the reasons behind the preceding statements.

I will do this, firstly, by going back to one of the highest principles of metaphysics, and bringing it down to earth in everyday life: the so-called principle of participation.

And, in particular, for our purposes, I believe it necessary to distinguish between:

participation in material realities
and that which is proper to the spiritual.

A) To participate in something physical (to take a part, destroying the whole)

A couple of ideas, regarding the first one, about participation in the physical.

It seems clear that, in order to share something corporeal, material, it is essential to divide it into parts and redistribute it , so that none of those who share it can possess the entire reality in question.
And if it is not about sharing, but about giving completely, the one who makes the donation of something material is inevitably left without what was given.

Just think of the absolute necessity of dividing an inheritance when there is more than one heir, or the impossibility of any of the children who come, with a sweet tooth, to a party eating all the sweets or the whole chocolate cake.

In a strictly material or physical sense, giving or distributing is equivalent to losing, to ceasing to possess.

The physical aspect diminishes when it is distributed.

B) To participate in spiritual matters (to nurture and develop them)

The same cannot be said of what, in a broad sense, we could call immaterial or, better yet, spiritual participation.

In it, not only is what has been participated not lost, but on many occasions it is gained, multiplied, and grows.

1) Joy

For example, the act of communicating a joy (of sharing with others what is making me happy) does not imply that our happiness decreases, but rather that it usually increases.
- And from there, among other reasons, comes the desire and almost the need to share our satisfactions with loved ones.
- Not only to make them happy, but also —although this is not usually what we seek and do not even think about it— because we ourselves feel happier when we communicate it or share it with others.
- Or, better yet, because joy itself, by its very nature, asks to be shared, it tends to expand.

Joy increases
when shared with others.

2) Knowledge

Something similar happens with knowledge . Except for environmental and psychological circumstances, the fact that something is explained to five or five hundred people does not, in itself, change the amount of knowledge that each person can assimilate.
- In an ideal scenario, all of them could fully embrace what is transmitted to them.
- And even if one of the listeners were better endowed and/or prepared than the speaker, through the speaker’s words they could come to understand reality with greater breadth and depth than the speaker himself.
But there is something else, and perhaps more significant: on many occasions, by communicating what we know, our own knowledge increases; we end up knowing it more and better.
- The teaching professional who doesn’t just read from notes or mechanically repeat what they’ve almost forgotten…; the one who, while explaining, thinks carefully about what they’re presenting…
- …instead of losing what he knows, in many cases he delves deeper into that knowledge and makes it clearer to himself, to the same extent that he rethinks it with the intention of making himself understood by those who are less gifted or prepared.

3) Love

And let’s not even talk about love!
Those who have truly immersed themselves in the experience are absolutely certain that, as they love more and better people, their capacity to love increases exponentially.
To paraphrase Heraclitus, one might say that the limits of the heart (of the will) will never be found: so vast are its borders… and they extend more and more as one loves more.

Spirituality does not diminish when you participate in it
and can even grow.

The growth inherent in love

Participation in the spiritual

The conclusion is self-evident.

Undoubtedly, whenever we give something with a physical component—time, attention, material possessions—we become unable to keep it or use it for other purposes. We lose it, even if we improve ourselves as a result of that generous giving (or are able to improve).

But, as I have just suggested, the same is not true of love, whose core is eminently spiritual.

And, as a consequence, it also has no place with those realities that we truly give with love and for love: whether they are material, spiritual, or a combination of both.

Certainly, what we have given is now unavailable to us, and in that sense, lost.
But, from a personal perspective, there is always an increase in perfection, which translates—among other things—into a growing ability to continue loving more and better and to be happier and happier.

Those who give themselves out of love
always come out ahead as individuals.

Without validity, the laws of the market

As I suggested earlier, the laws of exchange, typical of the market, do not apply to love , yet we are so accustomed to them that we tend to measure even the most genuine love with them!

Carlos Llano explains it this way :

Today, due to the prevailing mercantilism, the erroneous idea has spread that man’s natural impulse is the desire to remedy our deficiencies and not the outpouring of our fullness.
Many who think this way have marginalized family life and its profound educational impact; they have marginalized the life of the spirit, which grows when shared, limiting themselves only to matter, which is lost when shared.

And it concludes with the verses of Machado:

A coin in your hand / perhaps should be kept, / the little coin of the soul / is lost if it is not given away.

While in other areas no one gives what they don’t have,
in matters of love you only have what you give.

4. Let’s undo the paradox

The delivery of not delivering

The second consideration would give rise to lengthy discussions, but now is not the time to do so except to point them out.

The point is that, relatively often, we fail to fully understand what true dedication entails.

Specifically, we are unable to realize that, sometimes, surrendering consists precisely in not giving.
And that, in others, it will even involve requesting or, even more, demanding that the loved one be the one who gives themselves: that they carry out certain actions or activities, or that they adopt a particular attitude, which demands effort and dedication and self-forgetfulness.
If you demand it , I repeat, politely, but firmly, without concessions.

To help understand these last ideas, it is worth remembering that, in everything related to love, the only definitive criterion is the real good of you, of the other.

When it comes to true love,
the only definitive criterion is the real good of you, of the other.

The mirage of the false delivery

That exclusive attention to the good of the other —him or her— will help to uncover certain illusions.

They will highlight certain errors, which would lead us to consider as demands of surrender precisely that which opposes it, because it is not really a manifestation of love: for it does not help to improve the person whom we are supposedly loving.

In simple situations

Some examples are relatively simple and unproblematic.

It is not uncommon for the mother, sometimes against the friendly opposition of her husband, to insist on preventing her son or daughter, tired from the efforts of their studies (?), from doing the household chores that correspond to them: unloading the dishwasher, putting away the ironed clothes, vacuuming, doing the shopping…
It also often happens that the compassionate and devoted mother, after finishing the chores he should have done, finds that exhausted son, whom she has sent to bed instead of picking up the leftovers from dinner, sprawled out in front of the television or listening to music peacefully in his bed… “to recover from the enormous exertion of the whole day,” as the mother explains to herself in the height of affection and naiveté!

(It can also happen with the father, although perhaps—just perhaps—it is less frequent).

In more delicate cases

The issue usually becomes more complicated when this way of acting becomes habitual.

This seems to happen more easily in women, who are usually endowed with a sense and capacity for sacrifice full of good will, but sometimes excessive and misguided, because they do not result in a real benefit for the husband and children.

And that, moreover, they end up exhausting and making the wife and mother herself feel dissatisfied, thus incapacitating her from truly loving and exercising within the home the fundamental role that corresponds to her and in which she is irreplaceable.

Not every time something is given,
or something is surrendered,
is there genuine commitment.

The delivery of not delivering… what should not be delivered!

These and many other examples that could be cited highlight that, paradoxically, as I said, delivery sometimes consists of not delivering what should not be delivered.

That is, not giving in when what the husband does, for example, constitutes a more or less serious offense to the dignity of the wife, to the children and, above all, to himself.
And I am not speaking only or primarily of situations of infidelity in the strict sense, although I do not exclude them.
I am also referring to a type of disloyalty that is much less obvious, but far more common.

- The one that leads, for example, to making the wife absolutely responsible for the care of the home, the education of the children, stretching the money…
- …while the husband takes refuge in the well-deserved rest from work done outside the home and avoids any commitment, of greater or lesser magnitude, in relation to the needs of his wife and children.

Although I shouldn’t elaborate further, I believe these observations could help create harmony in homes and prevent dissatisfaction that, in the long run, can even lead to irreparable ruptures.

And they also illuminate, if attention is paid to them, the conditions of any training and improvement process.

Paradoxically, sometimes the most genuine commitment
consists of not giving
what should not be given.

(To be continued)

Tomás Melendo,
President of Edufamilia
http://www.edufamilia.com
[email protected]

EduFamilia

Edufamilia es una asociación sin ánimo de lucro, nacida en el año 2005. Su fundador, Tomás Melendo, advirtió que una mejora en la calidad de las familias facilitaría la resolución de bastantes de los problemas que aquejan a la sociedad de hoy. Y, apoyado siempre por su mujer, decidió lanzarse a esta aventura que cuenta con casi veinte años de vida y con múltiples ediciones de los distintos cursos formativos: Másteres y Maestrías, Expertos, cursos más breves, conferencias, ciclos culturales, seminarios y otros programas educativos. Aunque las primeras ediciones tuvieron carácter presencial, actualmente se ha hecho un gran esfuerzo por promover la infraestructura virtual para adaptarse a los nuevos tiempos y que la formación en torno a la familia alcance al mundo entero.