Is it Possible to Love Too Much?

These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder
Which as they kiss consume.
The sweetest honey is loathsome in his own deliciousness
and in the taste confounds the appetite
Therefore love moderately
Long love doth so
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

Fire. Gunpowder. Honey. Sounds like a lovely recipe for love, doesn't it? Throw in some more ingredients. Fireworks and sparks, oh boy. Nothing like it. And the sweet, sweet honey of love - how we crave it and long for it, and wish to return to those first moments where we revel in deliciousness of the first peachy flushes of a relationship. The first sip of an expensive wine. Romeo and Juliet were on that one - young lovers with their hearts a-fire, ready to throw all-in for love. To die for it. In his age and wise benevolence, the Friar gives a lecture that the young teenagers simply ignore, in the way teenagers or those in love do. No thanks, they cry in their besotted hearts, we cannot do without the other, because if we do, we will diiiiie. And die they do, eschewing moderation for some grand ideal of love, a trail of gunpowder in their wake that leads to the explosive, and very tragic, end.

The Friar argued that we can love too much, and such violent love can only have a violent end. Many scholars, on reading Shakespeare's tragedy romance, imagine the two teens growing old together and resentful. It makes a comic picture. Juliet looking longingily over the balcony to the life she could have had if she hadn't thrown it all away on what essentially was lust, wishing Romeo wouldn't leave his socks in a pile in the corner of the room for her to pick up, or than he would just kiss her like he used to and not look longingly at the younger girls at parties they way he used to look at her. Romeo, of course, is in his man cave, drinking a beer and wishing he'd gone on that boy's camping trip after all. Long love depends on understanding the fleetingness of lust and the more enduring affections of marriage that grow from shared experience and willingness to ride out the storms. To not seek perfection, but to love despite the flaws. To wake up from the hangover of love and realise it is not sickness at all, but a different kind of being in love.

His argument reminds me of Buddha's middle way. Don't gorge on the honey, lest you be ill. Don't attach yourself to the fleeting sweetnesses of life, because the loss of them can cause deep suffering. The more we attach, the deeper the pain, but also the stronger illusion that it can bring us happiness, and the more we chase. The more we define it, saying that love should be this thing, or love should not do this. We cage it, place boundaries around it, tether it, control it - as if real love can be controlled.

Yet oh, how our hearts love! How deeply we feel the pain of a child who dies, remembering their tiny hands clutched around a finger. How terribly it hurts to lose a father, a sister, a friend. It makes us wonder if it is better not to have loved at all, because the loss is so terribly painful. King Priam, in David Malouf's Ransom, wonders what it would have really been like to be a father, involved with his children, and not punctiliously a King so that his children are only to him symbolic of power and immortality. As he listens to the 'prattling' of a lowly cart driver who talks so fondly of his dead sons and tells him of how, upon the death of one, he sobbed 'fit to break my heart', he wonders whether fatherhood meant the 'the same thing for him as it did the driver'. The message? that as mortals, we 'must lose what is truly sweet to us', something the Gods have little understanding of, as they do not know what it is to truly love.

Pain is not a reason to put walls between ourselves and love, however, because to do so, means we are not being who we are as human beings. Life can teach us not to risk love, or to love to dearly, because it hurts terribly. Love moderately, we argue, because if we don't, there can only be a violent, tragic end - the violent pain of lost love can paralyse. Many 'never get over it', as they may long to, or we wish them to. The ache is always there, a sore spot forever rubbed raw.

I lie here thinking of you:—

the stain of love
is upon the world!
Yellow, yellow, yellow
it eats into the leaves,
smears with saffron
the horned branches that lean
heavily
against a smooth purple sky!
There is no light
only a honey-thick stain
that drips from leaf to leaf
and limb to limb
spoiling the colors
of the whole world—

you far off there under
the wine-red selvage of the west!

Love Song - William Carlos Williams

And so we return to honey again, the honey thick stain of love tainting the way we see the world. We chase after fleeting things. We are miserable when the honeymoon is over, longing for a time that has long past. We are angry when a lover leaves us for another. We cannot bear the pain in our hearts when people do what all mortals must do, and shuffle off this mortal coil, however untimely it might seem.

And yet.

Perhaps we are defining 'love' all wrong. Rumi, the great Sufi poet, compares this longing, painful love with the longing we have for the divine, and the bliss that comes with the realisation that all is God:

the sugar sack is ripped
spilling sugar
everywhere

I am so ruined
with love
that beggar children
stone me in the alleys

I am so mad with love
that madmen say
“Be still!”

This 'madness' is not the same madness as the young lovers of Shakespeare's play. It is one that sweeps up everything is existence - bird song, a child's cry, the motes of dust in the spread of sunlight that sweeps across a sick room, the purple storms turning fields to mud and ripping the roof of a building, the dance of lovers in the street, unrequited love, the destruction of a forest, the unfairness of it all.

Everything becomes alive with love, so the heart grows and expands until we are one with the entire loveliness of the universe. The ecstasy of the body, of earthly delights, are just momentarily glimpses into the larger glimpse of the soul that one might experience only in small morsels in a life time and long for forever - an orgasm, the love that shatters the heart when one holds their first child, the entering into the vast infinite space in a meditation hall. The vastness of this divine ocean of love, of the divine, renders us drunkards, Rumi poetically postulates:

I am so drunk
I have lost the way in
and the way out.
I have lost the earth, the moon, and the sky.
Don't put another cup of wine in my hand,
pour it in my mouth,
for I have lost the way to my mouth.

The attachments that we cling to, our beliefs, our desires, everything becomes burnt, discarded, swept away in the true love that comes from the innermost reaches of our heart space. How then can we not drum and dance and sing and be alive, then, despite all our losses, our grief, our loneliness, our human frailties?

I would rather love this much than never love at all.

This was written in response to TSU's Question of the Week, which asks if it is possible to love too much. What do you believe?

^{The background image features 'Female Lovers' by Egon Schiele', with the words of a Rumi fragment, overlaid.}

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