At the supermarket, I bumped into a school friend after eons. My happiness knew no bounds when our eyes met and nostalgia overtook us, as we reminisced the good old childhood days. I invited her home for dinner. However, when she shared her unnerving experience on ‘love’ it left my flustered. She recounted, “I met him online. When we finally met in person a few months later, I fell in love with him. We dated for nine months. He was my first love. I thought things were going quite well, when he announced, out of the blue, that he was moving back to his hometown. I was sad, but I didn’t think we needed to break up because the town was only two hours away. When I said so, he confessed that he was moving home to get back with his ex. Then I found their wedding announcement online. The wedding date had already passed. He’d been married a month before he broke up with me! After narrating this, she started sobbing bitterly.
After a while, when she finally gained composure, she asked me, “Please tell me, where should we look for love?”
Love is the subject of countless books, songs, films, plays, sonnets, articles, conversations, and advertisements; it is meditated on, longed for, and bemoaned; it is a source of anguish, ecstasy, and a varied range of emotions in between. Yet despite our ability today to acquire many things, love—or loving relationships with our friends, spouses, children, parents—often elude us.
Why? Let us explore the nature of true love—the warm, deep, personal, and profoundly tender feeling of affection one person has for another. Why, even though we crave it, does it bewitchingly escape us?
The soul by nature, constitutionally and eternally, is meant to love. Hence, each and every soul is finding avenues to express love, to channel this propensity to love someone, somewhere and somehow.
What kind of songs do most people listen to? What kind of novels do most people read? What kind of cinemas do most people watch? What is the subject of most television series? It’s all about 'love'. People are trying to find some means to find inner satisfaction through expressing this insatiable energy to love.
Lord Krishna explains in Bhagavad Gita that of all types of yogis, of all processes of yoga, the highest is to love. The Srimad Bhagavatam explains that there may be many who achieve impersonal liberation, and there may be millions who attain mystic siddhis, but none can find real peace. Only one who has awakened the propensity to love God within the heart can achieve real peace. So as we come closer to awakening that love, we’re actually making real progress in our life.
So, instead of looking for love from external sources around us in this material world such as expecting love from family, friends, relatives, pets, strangers... We must look for love where we are bound to get it, where there is no heartbreak, no sadness, no despair, no loneliness but the most precious form of love - Divine love from the Supreme Lord - pure love which is neither contaminated nor adulterated with some hidden motives or unspoken expectations in return.
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