Q24: What is Love and why is there suffering in Relationships?

Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

Well, if you have not known it, there is no way you can know it! There is not a single being on this planet which or who does not know what love is. On one hand this is true, on the other hand, nobody has known love.

Love is not something that you know, it is something that you feel. Why do you want to analyze and put a tag to it?

You can go on describing the shades of love, or the types of love that are there, but what are its repercussions? In fact, all the negative emotions are just distortions of love. Your anger is because of love. You love perfection, so you get angry at imperfections. You love people too much, and so it becomes jealousy or possessiveness. You love yourself too much, and that becomes arrogance. When you love objects more than people or more than anything else, then it is greed. Love plus knowledge or wisdom leads you to bliss. Love minus knowledge or wisdom, leads you to misery. We can go on analyzing it, but what is the use?

If you have a puppy at home, it will tell you what love is. If you have a dog at home, when you return home, it will show you what love is. It will not say, "Yesterday I greeted you, I don’t have to do it now". Every day when you come home, a dog or a baby can tell you what love is.

Hours of lecture cannot convey what a baby can convey in a fraction of a second.

As far as love is concerned, a thousand words cannot equal one glance, and a million glances cannot equal a moment of silence, one moment of that inner connection. That is love! You are made up of a substance called love and everything in the world is made up of that one thing called love.

Love with wisdom is bliss. Love without knowledge or wisdom is pain. Why is there pain in love? That is what you are wondering or questioning about! It is not love which is giving you pain. If it is just purely love, that means you just care for someone, you want the best for them, and then there is no pain. But when you want something in return from them or you have demands from them, then there is pain.

Small things like you love somebody and they didn’t smile at you, that is enough! You love somebody and they are interested in someone else, they flirt around or complement someone, good enough for you to burn the next 24 hours or days. Jealousy, hatred, greed, arrogance and attachment are all love’s distortions.

Love by itself doesn’t bring a misery. That is why knowledge and centered-ness are so important. If you centered, you can handle all these distortions, they come for a while and they disappear. Doesn’t matter, I will handle! I can easily manage people from falling!

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