There’s nothing wrong with romantic love or...

There’s nothing wrong with romantic love or sexuality in itself. Again, it’s the way that they get distorted when our lack gets projected into them. Romantic love becomes a problem when we expect our relationship with another person to solve our sense of lack. That places enormous burdens on the relationship, burdens that relationships usually can’t endure because the other person can’t do that for us. The other person cannot be our God. Nevertheless, for many of us it is relationships with other people that open up our hearts to the world. A relationship can open you up to a kind of love that becomes much more than one’s own desire, which is what touches me so deeply about Etty Hillesum. Those who get involved in relationships can realize that sex or the other expectations they have of the relationship aren’t getting them what they want. A common response to that is breaking up: obviously, this isn’t the right person for me; time to find someone else who will fill up my sense of lack. When that person doesn’t work out, we keep looking for someone new, trying to recover that romantic glow. But there’s another possibility: transforming our way of understanding the relationship, so it becomes an opening to something deeper, to seeing through to the other side of our sense of lack, to realizing that there’s something more profound and more creative going on there.

Lack and Liberation in Self and Society: An Interview with David Loy (from sharanam, who added, “I’ve mentioned it every time I’ve seen a quote of hers in my dashboard but I’ll say it again: An Interrupted Life is a memoir not to be missed. Especially if the quote above re relationship resonates. She was an extraordinary young woman and she truly understood what it meant to love and to live.”