Love Fully, Hold Loosely

The “I love you” I said to hear back

Two coffee cups on a kitchen table at night, one full and one empty, warm lamp light.

I used to say “I love you” the way you put a coin in a machine. Not because I loved the woman in front of me. I said it so she would say it back. Those three words were a mirror I held up to my own ego. When they came back, I felt big for a moment. Then I needed them again.

I’m not writing this to blame anyone, and I’m not writing it to say sorry for who I was. It’s what happened, and what it taught me.

The neighbour from number five

I was raised at home to care what other people thought. To be the best at everything. To know everything. That sounds harmless until you try to live it. If you have to know everything, you can never say “I don’t know.” So I made things up, and then I got lost in my own stories, trying to remember which “truth” I had told to whom.

A row of terraced house doors with a bright brass number five on one, a suitcase waiting outside.

And then there was the neighbour from number five. Every street has one. He’s the proverbial bloke whose holiday is always a bit longer, a bit sunnier, a bit further away. I spent real energy worrying whether I could afford a better holiday than him. It was pure one-upmanship, keeping up with the Joneses. He never knew he was in a race. I was running it alone.

Am I the best in bed?

A rumpled bed in soft morning light, two pillows, one with a gold prize ribbon draped over it.

It didn’t stop at the front door. In bed, I compared myself with my partners’ exes. One question ran the whole time: am I the best? I wasn’t with the woman I was with. I was competing with a ghost.

That’s what comparison does. It takes the most intimate thing two people can share and turns it into a scoreboard.

Love your neighbour, or beat him?

I was raised Catholic. I heard “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matthew 22:39, KJV) more times than I can count. Somewhere in my head it bent into something else: have it better than your neighbour.

A large honey cake on a table with many slices already cut and plenty left, soft honey-gold light.

Psychologists have a name for that bend. They call it zero-sum thinking: the gut feeling that life is a fixed pie, so if someone else gets more, I must have lost. In a 2010 study in Frontiers in Psychology, D. V. Meegan found that when students were shown a class where lots of top grades had already been given, they expected the next student to get a lower grade, even though top grades there weren’t rationed at all. Someone else’s gain felt like a loss, even with plenty to go round.

I treated love the same way. As if there were only so much, and I had to grab mine before the man at number five did.

Partners as trophies

Buddhism has a word for what I was doing: taṇhā. It means thirst, or craving, and the Buddha taught that suffering comes from it. I treated my partners like possessions, something to show off. A woman on my arm said something about me. That isn’t love. That’s thirst.

Party lights blurred through a rain-streaked window, a single trophy cup on the sill.

Life has a blunt way of teaching. My last ex showed me exactly what doesn’t matter. We were at a party where everyone was drunk and on cocaine and MDMA, and she almost slept with the neighbour from number five. Of course it was him.

And what did I do? I fought for her, because it couldn’t be that the guy from number five gets her. I called that love. It was fear and ownership wearing love’s clothes.

The storm in their minds

It took a massive nervous breakdown and a bed in a homeless shelter before I understood that I needed that lesson. I don’t blame her, and I don’t hate him. They did what they did out of their own storm in mind. I had done plenty out of mine. I wrote about what drinking and anger cost my body in What My Knee Knows About “I”.

Storm clouds over open moorland breaking open to a strip of honey-gold light.

Jesus put it more plainly than I can: “love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44, WEB). When Peter asked whether he should forgive his brother as many as seven times, Jesus answered, “I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22, KJV). In other words, stop counting.

I didn’t understand Jesus’s teachings until Buddhism and meditation showed me the way. These days I chant and meditate, and his words land differently. The man at number five isn’t my rival. He’s my neighbour.

Two open hands held palm-up in morning light, a bee resting on one fingertip.

Buddhism gave me another word I needed: muditā, joy at someone else’s good fortune, even when it does nothing for me. It’s the straight answer to envy. If the man at number five has a lovely holiday, good. The old wish, “May all be well and secure, may all beings be happy!” (Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta, Sutta Nipāta 1.8, tr. Buddharakkhita), includes him too. Some of that practice happens at a sink in Bradford, serving food (A Slower Mind at the Sink).

Jesus showed me love with no limits. The Buddha showed me how to love without clinging. Every day I try to love like the Buddha and like Jesus, and to show the world my Buddhahood. Not perfectly. Daily.

So I’ll say it again, and this time I want nothing back.

I love you.

If you’re in a dark place right now, Samaritans are free on 116 123 (UK), any time, day or night.