Have you ever met anybody who doesn’t need to love? I haven’t. If I ask that question most people think I am talking about the need to feel loved. Getting your head around the ‘need to love’ takes a thought or two. It isn’t a pay-forward for pay-back but it is about yourself. A gift that expects no dividend is very rare. Agape love may be noble but it can seem sadly self-punishing. To become a better person is about as objective and unselfish as it is reasonable for a human to wish.
Needing to love is a deep dive into our feelings. It is overwhelmingly ‘sensing’ which is why we long to promote and develop this side of our spirit. AI cannot sense like us. When we sense, it is for ourselves – the same as most of what we do. How we do it is what makes it useful to others. So where does this yearning to love come from? How do we feel it? Is it legitimate? Is the indulgence associated with it good or meretricious?
You have a need to love. I have a need to love. Should we indulge that need? My answer is a very positive yes. But suppose it makes us sad and tearful? What if we find those we would love are flawed, not the perfection we sought, not the solace we needed? What if the beloved dies, goes away, stops receiving our love? The need to love is a need not only to love others. It is a need to love ourselves, too. Not in a narcissistic or self-adulating way but in the way that spells peace not turmoil.
Religions talk about forgiveness. To forgive someone a harm they have done us is generous and generosity is good for both giver and receiver. But if we compare the good and the not so good in our lives we find that we do not actually have much to forgive. I’m sure some people do. Realistically, you and I don’t. Moreover, many of the things we have ourselves suffered have made us stronger, even sometimes wiser. I did not love WWII but I loved the way it made me grow up early in life. I loved being credited with the capability to be more responsible than most children of my age.
The greatest love you can have is not for yourself or your lover or your friends. It is for the unlovable. It is great for two reasons. First, it is self-evidently generous. But it is also great because sometimes it changes the unlovable into the lovable. How is that? The unlovable are what they are largely because they are defensive against what they see as persecution. The rudeness, lack of humour, nastiness they exude is a tirade against an imagined aggressor. You have felt it at some time. So has everyone else. When frozen it is as deadly as permafrost.
Psychopaths and sociopaths at a certain level are suffering from serious mental sicknesses. But we all suffer from some of their problems at certain times of our lives and in particular situations when the stress of self-loathing gets too much. Forgiving ourselves in such predicaments tends merely to compound the guilt. Loving ourselves motivates improvement.
Loving someone else or loving something of creative and sensing value is the best reward for the lonely. A man once sat in front of a picture in a national art gallery for eight hours a day every day for a year. When asked why, he replied that it was how he had come first to understand the picture and then to love it. He kept a copy of it in his home for the rest of his life.
Fulfilling his need to love gave him comfort, inspiration and a sense of familiarity. The love couldn’t, of course, be reciprocated in the way a person might return affection.
His love was what still made it meaningful.
It’s what our love can do.
Good morning
John Bittleston
What is the love that helps you most? Please tell us at [email protected].
We love those who know the worst of us and don’t turn their faces away
Walker Percy, author
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, poet
19 May 2025
