Every separation is a link. – Simone Weil

Nothing is written about as much as love, and nothing is so misunderstood and often enough completely misrepresented as love. This is true not only of the Western Christian culture of the Occident, but I see it virtually almost identical in the other great patriarchal cultures throughout history, in the West as well as in the East. The few reasonably well known love stories of the "New World" and its cultures we know only through Western perception and interpretation, and this must also be said about such stories of African cultures, which in turn were perceived and retold through Islamic-Arab eyes.

Be it 1001 Nights in the Islamic-Oriental world, Prince Rama and Princess Sita in Hinduism, related and similar stories and myths between Thailand and China, or stories like Tristan and Isolde in the West, love is without exception given a very specific face and dynamic, namely that of passion and sacrifice, and that this sacrifice has an immeasurably higher value than a happy coexistence of the lovers.

The second face of love idealized and highly stylized in these societies is that of the love between mother and child, or the mother for her child. This love is portrayed as infallible and godlike, and if a woman does not conform to this image due to the fact that she, too, is only a fallible human being with fears and weaknesses and hopes and anxieties, she is attacked from all sides and not infrequently downright beaten up. And that most societies, and not only the patriarchal ones, push and/or have pushed women into motherhood, we now also know, as we see in the societies of the technologized and materially highly developed so-called "First World", where women can now live independently of families and husbands and therefore all too often decide against motherhood, regardless of the unchanged social pressure.

The mother's sacrifice for her child... this unconditional love that would last until death… the child's blind attachment to the mother…

… this is also the basis for romantic love, usually between a woman and a man, but also for same-sex loving and living people.

There is "fighting" for each other, there is renouncing, there is "taking the stars from the sky", there is waiting for each other, there is overcoming mountains and seas… and the louder and more raving all this is, the stronger is the love - so the claim, so the assumption, so it is told to the children. Tristan wants Isolde, but because she is married to his king, he cannot have her, and they both cry themselves to sleep at night…

Princess Sita is kidnapped by an enemy king and held hostage, and when she returns home, the people doubt her respectability - to preserve the reputation of her husband Prince Rama and the family, she leaves him to live as a hermit in the forest (she also has her son there, and some also say Prince Rama chased her away in disgrace...).

Romeo and Juliet, two children still, kill themselves (this story lasts less than a week), Casablanca brings it to the big screen in black and white, and Gone With The Wind then in color…

The more dramatic, the greater… the more genuine, we are told, the more lasting and profound…

And that is exactly what is wrong.

All of these stories are more about attachment than love, and of course a fair amount of carnal desire. If Romeo would have had his Juliet, he would have been a multiple father by his mid-20s, she would have been a multiple mother by her barely 20s, they probably would have lived in separate houses, which was common among families of the nobility and moneyed aristocracy at the time, and they probably would not have had much to do with each other, on the whole, by the time they’d have been young adults.

Tristan and Isolde could have eloped, then they would probably have ended up on some island and led a poor fisherman's life, with or without children, hard and boring - but perhaps actually something like happy together.

Sita and Rama, too, could have defied the constraints of their society... But in these two stories, all the participants also still have high ethics that govern their actions. It's not just about perhaps quick passing impulses. There is something more that governs life for these characters. Perhaps we can actually speak of love here, and not just infatuation.

The ideal of the society and time we live in is clearly infatuation, and that is attachment. It is about "taking possession" and "conquering," about holding and clinging…

The other extreme, which we encounter very often in social media spirituality and psychology, is letting go.

Between these two poles people's lives oscillate.

I do not want to claim here that I have understood what love is. I haven't. But I dare say that it is not about holding on and letting go. And infatuation also has little to often nothing to do with love, infatuation is a form of attachment.

Love, as I experience it, in its various forms... This is more a "being there". A "being present." If it is screaming around and tugging and burning at the heart and in the belly, then it is not love. It is love when it pulses quietly and unagitatedly within us, and breathes around us. When it breathes us. In this breathing, this inhaling and exhaling, there is a place for arguing and screaming and crying, just as there is a place for laughing and kissing and holding each other. One is embedded in it, and yet this something is free, completely free. It is warm and deep and powerful, and above all it is quiet. So quiet that sometimes, or often, you don't even notice it.

Until something happens, and suddenly life stands before us with all its relentless urgency, because love, love is life.