As Pema Chodron said, if we can free our love of an object, our broken sweet heart can be a force for compassion and peace instead of clinging and klesha.

I love this woman with all my heart. I love all the parts of her that I have met, and she loves all the parts of me that she has met, and we look forward to, mutually, freediving into the rich depths of our hearts together.

But love, still, is not just about our love. That would be selfish love. Love is about…

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

May our love will help one another to face outward, not merely inward.

“But let there be spaces in your togetherness

and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but

make not a bond of love:

let it rather be a moving sea

between the shores of your souls.” ~ Kahlil Gibran

“For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

From my first book, Things I would like to do with You, on the Buddhist notion of Love:

I would like to communicate with you about difficult things.

Love can survive fear only if acknowledged.

Things are not easy, always. A love affair is not imagination. It is the vicissitudes of daily life. It is two lifestreams intermingling. It is heavy silence with nothing to say. It is inadvertently making big deals about small nothings. I would like to hear you give voice in the hard times—then I can know this is a river of true love, and not merely a shallow standing pool.

Love is not fantasy, it is bricks and mortar. Relationship is earth. Love is fantasy, too. It is heaven: dreams and hormones and the pleasure in biology and sudden laughter. It is the rub between the two that creates sparks: earth striking against heaven.

It is communication that is water that cools those sparks, and gets us through the fear of loss, the difficult times, the simple arguments over dishes or the serious arguments over ethics…”

Genuine love is friendship.
Genuine love resides only in the present moment.
Genuine love is everyday.
Genuine love feels no need to entertain the space away.
Genuine love is up,
genuine love is down and yet genuine love never wavers.
Love is something else entire: it is caring. It is arguing, but with curiosity—it is giving an inch when the other is certainly wrong—it is teasing, it is empathy, it is respect, it is admiration each morning.”

~ Waylon H. Lewis, Things I Would Like To Do With You

From my article on Elephant, Love is Selfish:

The kind of love I’ve been brought up to look for isn’t a lifelong picnic. It’s a partnership, with loneliness built in.

In the Buddhist tradition, there’s no “tying the knot.” There’s no two candles, two souls “becoming one.” Instead of facing one another, completing one another (Jerry Maguire) and living happily ever after (which only happens in fiction and even then they never show, they just tell), the Buddhist visualization of a successful marriage is this:

Two friends (who want to make out constantly) facing the same direction together, symbolically east—the direction of the rising sun—as in our awakening, fundamentally a-ok human nature. Walking the path together. Helping one another to be of benefit.

A Buddhist Wedding. A Buddhist Wedding Poem.