If you live long enough and wide enough, you come to see that love is simply the breadth of the aperture through which you let in the reality of another and the quality of attention you pay what you see. It is, in this sense, not a phenomenon that happens unto you but a creative act. The poet Robert Graves knew this: “Love is not kindly nor yet grim, but does to you as you to him,” he wrote as a young man a lifetime before the old man came to define love as “a recognition of truth, a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that… makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other.”

Most of our heartbreak, most of our aching sense of failure at love, comes from the idea, central to our dominant cultural mythology, that this truth, this recognition, is a static reward to be attained — through effort, through bargaining, through self-negation — rather than the dynamic process it is, an end-point state of soul-merging rather than an infinite vector of growing understanding, of deepening mutual compassion, of simultaneous self-possession and unselfing.

D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) mounts a passionate defense of the process over the product in his autobiographically tinted 1922 novel Aaron’s Rod (free ebook | public library), animated by the perennial question and perennial confusion of what love actually is, what it looks like between people and how it lives within a person.

Unwilling to risk love’s danger of self-abandon yet unable to accept loneliness as a state of fulfillment, the protagonist attributes the irreconcilable tension to a broken cultural model of love as “a battle in which each party strove for the mastery of the other’s soul.” He reckons with the necessary recalibration:

We have pushed a process into a goal. The aim of any process is not the perpetuation of that process, but the completion thereof. Love is a process of the incomprehensible human soul: love also incomprehensible, but still only a process. The process should work to a completion, not to some horror of intensification and extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately perish. The completion of the process of love is the arrival at a state of simple, pure self- possession… Only that. Which isn’t exciting enough for us sensationalists. We prefer abysses and maudlin self-abandon and self-sacrifice, the degeneration into a sort of slime and merge.

[…]

Perhaps, truly, the process of love is never accomplished. But it moves in great stages, and at the end of each stage a true goal, where the soul possesses itself in simple and generous singleness. Without this, love is a disease.

Given this process demands everything of us, given it asks us to risk everything, perhaps it is just easier to spare ourselves the pain of longing and the anxiety of loss by not undertaking it at all. He considers this, seduced by the fantasy of a life free from longing and therefore immune to disappointment, and tries to find affirmation for it in nature, whose living metaphors are always the clearest mirror for the soul:

The lily toils and spins hard enough, in her own way. But without that strain and that anxiety with which we try to weave ourselves a life. The lily is life-rooted, life-central. She cannot worry. She is life itself, a little, delicate fountain playing creatively, for as long or as short a time as may be, and unable to be anxious… Happy lily, never to be saddled with an idee fixe, never to be in the grip of a monomania for happiness or love or fulfillment.

And yet, he realizes, this way of being is a negation of something elemental. It gives the illusion of “life-rootedness,” but denies the soul its necessary flight. He considers another way of being, one truer to the nature of love and the nature of the soul — being “happily alone in all the wonders of communion, swept up on the winds, but never swept away from one’s very self.”

Drawing on “The Dalliance of the Eagles” — exulting in the birds’ “rushing amorous contact high in space together,” their way of attaining “a motionless still balance in the air, then parting” — Lawrence reflects on the balance between communion and self-possession that it models:

Two a eagles in mid-air, maybe… Two eagles in mid-air, grappling, whirling, coming to their intensification of love-oneness there in mid-air. In mid-air the love consummation. But all the time each lifted on its own wings: each bearing itself up on its own wings at every moment of the mid-air love consummation. That is the splendid love-way.

Couple with Kahlil Gibran writing in that same epoch about this same difficult balance of intimacy and independence, then revisit Lawrence on the art of divination, how to live with our conflicted parts, the strength of sensitivity, and the key to living fully.