DD 9/13/04 EXCERPT FROM "THE POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP"

This wonderful definition of love comes from one of the "classics" of the growing literature on polyamory, an article called "The Possible Relationship," published in 1985. The full article can be found at
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC10/UVFamily.htm
THE SPACE OF LOVE
Through our heart sharings, we encountered our next unexpected lesson in relationship. When we listened without judgment and shared without editing, we found that we were consistently "in love with each other." But it wasn't love as we had known it - love as a reaction to another person. It was love that came from simply removing all the resistance to each other. As we gained our sea legs on this ocean of love that we created nightly in our heart sharing ritual, we gradually began to carry it over into everyday life - we could be "in love" while cooking, gardening, walking by the ocean, with someone in a foul mood or by ourselves, because the door to love was within us. Love wasn't an emotion (though wonderful emotions went along with it) and it wasn't a response; it was more like a choice. Love was a space. It couldn't be given or received, only entered.
What was askew in our old notion about love was that we had thought of it as though it were a vector, which in math is something that has direction and magnitude (and in biology is a disease carrier!). Since a vector is like an arrow, we dubbed this the "Cupid" model of love. Trying to love using this model looks something like this: Boy finds "someone to love." Out comes an arrow and "ping!" he shoots it over to her - and then waits. Will she shoot one of her arrows back? If not, he's lost part of his love (good thing he played it safe and didn't shoot all his love arrows over to her!). But if she shoots two back, wowee, she loves him more than he loves her! What if another guy comes along and shoots her an arrow? Whose love will she return? After all, there's a limited supply of love arrows . . . and on and on the game goes. Fortunately, we made the discovery that love, rather than being a vector, was a space - a limitless space - that any of us could enter by letting go of our protective games. Each one of us had our own door to the room of love, one uniquely shaped in the image and likeness of our naked selves. We had to leave our masks and armor and baggage outside the room of love and could only retrieve them by leaving love. Judgment, taking offense, blame and guilt are a few of the components of that baggage - they exist only outside the room of love.
So we found that we don't need anything or anybody to be in love. But how do we account for that sense of interpersonal love, that caring for one another? We found that when any one of us was in the space of love and when another person, through his or her own relinquishing of ego, entered that room of love, then we were "in love with each other" - not as a reaction to that person's looks or personality (these qualities are outside the door), but simply by ending up in the space of love together. All people in love are in the same space. Some are so transient that one moment they're in and the next they're out. They have not established residence there. Others, commonly known as saints, live there full-time. From this standpoint, to say, "I love you" means that there is nothing - no personal "stuff," distortions, agendas or needs - in the way of being with you totally.
We found consistently that when we based our relationships on shared residency in the room of love, every aspect of the relationship, from the sexual to the intellectual, was easy to work out. But every time we'd run out to play with some of the baggage outside - be it sexual attraction, or anger or a desire to rescue someone - suddenly there would loom insurmountable problems. Solution: stay in love. Absurdly simple - and not always easy to live.