The Essence of Love is Choice

What did I mean when I said “The essence of love is choice?”

Love is our heart’s choice, our heart’s desire. We love people, places, pets, belongings, our work, our play—when of all the possibilities that exist, our heart says, “This one!”

Opposite love and our heart’s choice is constraint, that will force us to follow a particular course no matter how our heart feels about it. On the most zoomed out level, that constraint always takes the form of fear of what will happen if we don’t. This is why the opposite of love is fear.

When we are free from fear, we will naturally choose what we love. But when we’re afraid, we’re much more likely to choose what we think is safe. Essentially, love and fear are two different compasses that we can use to navigate our existence. If we use the love compass, the needle will always point in the direction of our heart’s choice, and it will lead us along the path of our desire, which is also the path of our soul’s purpose. If we use the fear compass, the needle will always point in the direction of safety, and it will lead us along the path of least resistance.

Guess which one our culture hands us and teaches us to use?

Here’s how this plays out in the arena of romantic love and marriage. According to our stories, when it comes to romantic love, our heart runs the show. It chooses who it chooses and if their heart chooses us back, then that’s about as close as we get to heaven on earth. We visit that story in fiction because we’re too scared to do it that way in real life. In real life, we use the fear compass first to eliminate candidates. This one’s unavailable, this one has a lot of credit card debt, this one sleeps around, this one doesn’t want kids and I do. We can’t trust the heart’s compass, because it’s notorious for failing to consider these kinds of issues. We’d rather trust a dating app. Often, before we even consult the heart’s compass, there’s only one or two suitors left standing, neither of whom our heart would have picked from the original lineup.

A significant percentage of marriages are not built on the foundation of, this is the love of my life. Instead, they are built on twin fears: I can’t do better than this, and I don’t want to die alone. These are not attractive footings, but they are structurally sound. If two people remain united by these fears, they can ignore the stink from the basement and live together indefinitely. Historically, this has been the way the marriages that work—do that work.

But say two people genuinely did use their heart compasses to find each other. Wonderful, hooray, let’s celebrate by getting married! But marriage in itself is a choice dictated by the fear compass. When two people are each other’s heart’s choice and they’re following the paths of their mutual desire, they’re choosing one another intrinsically. Neither of them wants to be anywhere else. But marriage is what happens when they look down the path and think, what if one day one of us wants to be somewhere else? How awful, let’s sign a contract that we’ll always stay together. That’s fear. What the contract actually says is, if at some point in the future our hearts stop choosing one another, we will stay together anyway. This is not romantic at all. This is a voluntary prison sentence.

So what’s the alternative?

Simplistically, it’s to throw away the fear compass and only ever use the heart’s compass. And we’ve already touched on the excellent reasons we don’t want to do this. Our heart is not only not going to take the safe route, it’s going to lead us straight to our personal definition of hell. Child of an alcoholic? Victim of abuse? Family history of dysfunction so obscure and specific it doesn’t even have a diagnosis? Your heart is going to take you straight to the closet and fling you into the arms of your own personal skeletons. This sounds like something we’d like to avoid at all costs, and in fact we’ve built an entire therapy industry to try to help us do just that.

But there is a reason our hearts do this. Our heart’s compass points us down the path of our soul’s purpose. Right now, in the world we’re experiencing, everything is breaking. You’ve heard of the four horsemen of the apocalypse—War, Famine, Death, and Conquest? We can’t turn on the news without seeing one or all of these guys. They’re on a rampage. Our souls did not incarnate at this particular juncture of human development to stay safe. Pretty much every one of us who is here right now came to be part of the breaking down of old patterns in order to build something better. And you know what you have to do with a pattern before you can break it? You have to see it. You have to experience it. You have to do it as many times as it takes to decide, “You know what? I quit.”

So love of your life number 1, 2, and 15—if you’re a slow learner—is going to take you straight to hell. This is going to happen until you look up and realize that the gates are standing open, the guards are asleep, and your heart’s compass needle is pointing the way out. But if you go, you are going to have to leave your love behind. This is one of the rules of hell. You can leave at any time, but you can’t take anyone else with you. They might learn from your example and follow you out, or they might not. Even if they do, they might take a different route once they’re past the gate. You can’t know.

If your old love doesn’t catch up to you, a new one will meet you down the road. And almost immediately, they’re going to invite you back to hell. But this time, your heart’s compass will be pointing the other way. And this will go however it goes until you realize that the answer is always, always, always to follow your heart’s compass, and not the other person. This doesn’t mean you’ll be alone. It means you’ll be with the lover, and the friends, and the family, and the colleagues whose paths of desire, whose soul purposes, naturally converge and merge with yours. And once you’ve experienced this, you will never again want to trade that kind of company for the kind that is only there because of the shackles.

But what about loyalty? Loyalty comes in different flavors. When we’re in fear, we prefer our loyalty in the form of commitment. We lock the doors and impose penalties for non-compliance. When we’re in love, we practice the loyalty of dedication. We show up every day out of passion and desire, with the energy of our own intrinsic sense of meaning and purpose. When we’re dedicated, you can’t drive us away. When we’re merely committed, we’ll be gone the moment we’re off the hook. So let our weddings be ceremonies of dedication, let our wedding rings be symbols of dedication, let our marriages be acts of dedication. And let our commitments describe how we will see out our shared endeavors if the fire of our dedication ever burns out.

But how do we get there from here? Never start with the how. Start with the what. If you let your heart choose the what, it will chart its own course, and the how will come clear along the way.