“What’s Love Got To Do With It?”  Tina Turner asks, in a performance that’s more like the detonation of a live grenade.

  She lists the reasons her body lights up around this person ~ it’s physical, biological, logical ~ but love doesn’t enter into it. As the musical question makes clear, though, she’s conflicted. It scares her to feel this way. She’s likely hoping love has nothing to do with it.

  This song is a favorite. Perhaps because love has often felt painful, confusing, and scary for me. I can sympathize. Maybe you, too, have kissed a lot of frogs or otherwise had your wings burnt by love?

  We wait for it fall in our lap. Or we desperately seek it, usually where it’s least likely hiding. As if it’s something that can be discovered, or won, or achieved.

  A while back I found myself stuck in a rut with some of the very closest people in my life. I loved them ~ or so I imagined ~ but there were things in our interactions that left me feeling unloved in return. Things they said and did made me wonder if they knew me, saw me, or even cared about me. My expectations of friendship, affection, rapport were seemingly unmet. I felt lonely.

  Then, I don’t know how or why, something changed. Some frozen ice dam in my heart thawed out. I began to see that all I had been experiencing was generated by me. I’d been expecting my love to be returned exactly as I gave it, like when you ask for a refund at the hardware store. I’d been blind to the ways they had been loving me all along. just because they didn’t fit some inner template for how love ought to look.

  “…who needs a heart / when a heart can be broken?”

  I remember choosing just to love them exactly as they were. It wasn’t so much a conscious decision, as it was “Why not try? What have I got to lose?” To forget about what I was and was not getting out of the connection, and concentrate on giving into the connection. To focus all my energy on heaping love upon them, unconditionally, and see where that led.

  It felt very strange at first. My customary righteous grievances gradually became less compelling, less maddeningly frustrating. They fell to the level of minor blips or tiny annoyances. (At first, I sort of missed them!)

  I began to feel a slow but steady sea change in my body and spirit. Instead of being bothered by what had annoyed me, upset me, made me angry ~ I began to see things about these beloved folks that, in my consuming desire for the perfect return of love, I had missed. Wonderful things!

  In some deep seismic shift, I began to feel a great warmth of love from my own heart, for them and for myself. And the love they had for me ~ had always had ~ was finally present in full measure.

  And I’d swear they seemed to grow happier and more comfortable in my presence.

  Funny how that happens.

  Musical questions are not asked in order to be answered. Often they have no answer. Rather, like Zen koans, they are an invitation to ponder deeply upon the mystery. Perhaps there’s no greater mystery than love. So I offer this, my experience, as a spur to your own pondering. No matter what your results, the attempt is bound to bring more love into the world!

  “What’s love but a secondhand emotion?”

  Let’s make it first.