A Marriage of Sweet and Bitter: Love Is Not an Either-Or Equation

We can probably all relate to the experience of feeling divided within ourselves, occasionally against ourselves, and love will certainly induce this as handily as any of life’s experiences.

A little-known fact about Cupid may help explain this. He is said to have carried in his quiver two kinds of arrows, gold-tipped and lead-tipped. One struck you with love, the other with hate.

Love and Rage Intertwined

It seems we each carry the broken-off shafts of both of Cupid’s arrows in our flesh, and must learn to manage their countervailing effects. The author Nancy Friday puts it in blunter terms:

“Men may love women, but they are in a rage with them, too. I believe it is a triumph of the human psyche that out of this contradiction, a new form of emotion emerges, one so human it is unknown to animals even one step lower on the evolutionary scale: passion.”

This same tangle of love and lamentation, joy and suffering, surely goes for women as well as men, but the point is that we’re pitted against ourselves, and each other. A relationship will always be both safe harbor and storm. It will always challenge us to burn without being consumed, to have and to hold without possessing. And love and passion will always be difficult to uphold in partnership because they work toward different goals.


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Security vs. Wild Abandon

Love wants assurances, passion wants abandon. Love wants to be soothed, passion wants to be stimulated. Love wants to go steady, passion wants to be swept away.

These impulses working at such cross-purposes can spell trouble for romance because, among other things, it’s hard to stay worked up over the same person you look to for safety and security, and the truth is that most people consider it a fair trade to swap heat for warmth and passion for companionship. Nor is romance even something everyone misses as time goes by. For some, respect or loyalty or friendship are the overriding virtues of love, and serenity rather than passion the state they seek to cultivate.

Love is Not An Either/Or Equation

The missing link in our understanding is that love isn’t an either/ or equation, though we’ve been told it is: you either have passion or serenity in a relationship, but not both. You either have sex and romance or companionable bonding, but not both. You either have freedom or commitment. You either have Wuthering Heights  or The Remains of the Day.

But it’s not either/ or. It’s both/ and. There are two right answers to the question of sustaining desire in relationship, not one.

Try this exercise, compliments of Barry Johnson, founder of a system called Polarity Management: breathe in and hold the air in your lungs as long as possible. It feels good for a while, but then as the oxygen turns into carbon dioxide, you begin to crave air. Now exhale. It feels good for a while, but as you blow your breath out, it begins to feel suffocating.

It’s the same with all the polarities in relationship. They’re tensions to manage, not problems to solve. If one side wins over the other, the organism loses, and the relationship loses. In a sense, evolution itself loses.

Maintaining Equilibrium Between Unity and Polarity

In most creation myths the world over— the stories that people of nearly all cultures have used to explain their origins and that are really about the birth of consciousness—unity inevitably evolves into opposites. If this didn’t happen, life would come to a standstill. The development of consciousness, these stories tell us, requires opposition, polarity.

Nor is relationship a shuttling between only two antipodal states. It’s a mosh pit of emotions. Intimate relationship flushes so many different feelings up to the surface, sometimes in rapid succession—desire, vulnerability, anxiety, aversion, anger, guilt, sorrow, ecstasy, gratitude—that to appreciate if not reap the richness of it all, we have to sit zazen with each of them and not push any of them away, immersing ourselves in the flow of it all. Now this, now this, now this.

Maintaining equilibrium, and thus passion, requires a skill I once heard described as “heroism redefined for the modern age.” And that is the ability to tolerate paradox, to hold two contrary forces or impulses or ideas or beliefs inside you— and your relationships— at the same time and still retain the ability to function, if not hold on to your cookies. Security and passion, commitment and freedom, head and heart, love and hate, us and them.

Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA).
©2014 by Gregg Levoy.  www.us.PenguinGroup.com.

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by Gregg Levoy.

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About the Author

Gregg Levoy, author of: Vital SignsGregg Levoy, author of Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life is a former columnist and reporter for USA Today and the Cincinnati Enquirer, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Psychology Today, American Health, and others. He has presented at the Smithsonian Institution, Microsoft, Environmental Protection Agency, National Conference on Positive Aging, National Career Development Association, and American Counseling Association, and been a frequent guest of the media, including ABC-TV, CNN, NPR and PBS. His website is www.GreggLevoy.com

Watch a presentation by Gregg Levoy: Living with Passion