Love's First Glimpse of Love Itself

from 'The Three Marriages'

Photo: © David Whyte

As living beings we can’t help paying attention to things other than ourselves. Though we might be weak or wounded in one or more of them, we have all the five senses through which to create a constant subliminal conversation with the world outside.

We may not set out to look for a relationship: for a job or a better understanding of ourselves, but if we are sincerely paying attention, we most often end up with all three of them, whether we want them or not. We find ourselves in these relationships because we were made to be both aware of and entangled with the world through our senses. Our ability to survive depends on the acuteness of our senses, but the same faculties that help us to pay attention to what is around us, to ward off threats and seize proffered opportunities, are also the same senses by which we are beguiled and intoxicated and made to fall in love.

This falling in love can occur in a multiplicity of ways. We have the remarkable ability as human beings to fall in love with a person, a work, or even an idea of ourselves. That is, we create a relationship that has a perfected image of what we first encounter, a sense of longing for the perfect person, the ideal work, the full potential of our own character. We fall in love through seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, intuiting and longing. These senses are constantly mediating the frontier between what we think is a self and what we think is other than our selves.

First, we have eyes, taken mostly for granted, with which to see a new moon or a tiny memo. We have ears, not fully appreciated, with which to entertain a grand opera or a humble opinion, and we have those tireless hands used every day to pull others toward us or push them away; most especially we have a tongue with which to taste, to give voice to desires or to lash others with our pent-up disapproval. We also have the intellect to contrast and compare, to measure carefully and weigh things in the balance. Then, beneath them all, untiring but seldom listened to, we have that sixth sense acknowledged in almost all traditions: a swirling internal formation called the intuition, the imagination, the heart, the almost prophetic part of a person that at its best somehow seems to know what is good and what is bad for us, but also what pattern is just about to precipitate, what out of a hundred possibilities is just about to happen, in a sense, an unspoken faculty for knowing what season we are in. What is about to die and what is about to come into being.

We follow this constant internal seasonal round of living and dying throughout our lives, trying to understand what it is we need, what is coming to fruition and what we have to let go of. In the first half of life we especially look for clues as to what lies ahead of us. Looking out of the windows of our parents’ house, we want to know both how to belong to that world through a work and what specifically we should belong to in the sense of a community, an organization or an idea. At first, that waiting world appears to hold a level of complexity that seems beyond us.

We start paying attention to this world before we are born. Our ears, medical research tells us, have us fall in love with our mother’s heartbeat and then, as we grow as unborn children, to the sound of both our parents’ voices resonating, far outside that protected tidal beat of the womb. We shush a baby to sleep because the sound mimics that internal swirl of amniotic fluid in which the child was first formed and felt safe.

When we leave the enclosed safety of the womb at birth, our new eyes look immediately for a face, for a breast, and our fingers reach out, curling and uncurling as if trying to compass the physicality of the world, as if testing and retesting both the presence and the possible absence of something, as if testing the very ability for touch itself.

At birth, we fall in love again with our mother through our visual and physical senses. In a sense we come already equipped with the knowledge of what to look for. Far inside each of us is a foundational ground that recognizes mother. Our survival depends on it. We look for nourishment and protection in those first moments but also, ultimately, underneath it all, though we do not know it, for something that is actually preparing us one day for leaving that same loving protection, for an enabling force helping us to stand on our own two feet.

It is intriguing to think that the first falling in love that happens to a person has at its base something that must also, at the end, take the person beyond that cradling hand. Our first love is something that has the seeds of its own demise right at the center of its very necessity. It may be that within the seed of any relationship, any work, any established sense of identity, is an internal intuition of how it will eventually disappear. Something inside the protective walls of our happy relationship, our settled career, our established sense of our self may be preparing us, willingly or unwillingly, for an emancipation, a life beyond it which if intuited too early might be frightening to us, beyond our ability to reach.

—excerpt from ‘Love’s First Glimpse: Looking for a Mate, a Job, A Life’ from The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

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