The Emptiness of Love

I think we are all familiar with the attached version of love. With it comes expectations of how we and our loved ones should be (“If you loved me, then you would…”) and then the ensuing judgment, blame, and shame when none of us meets those expectations. This dynamic arises in unfulfillable expectations of fairness in the division of labor in the household, or futilely trying to adopt identical parenting styles, or assuming that the support our loved one needs in a time of grief mirrors what we need in a similar circumstance. It also includes the disappointment, anger, or frustration we feel when our loved one doesn’t “give us what we need”: the wrong gesture or gift or the wrong response to ours.

At our wedding over twenty years ago, the Unitarian minister David Takahashi Morris compared this attached version of love to the traditional marriage metaphor of “tying the knot.” When our love is a tied knot, we are holding the other person in place with our demands and expectations while we cling to them so tightly that we are also unable to move. There is no space to freely be ourselves in this kind of relationship and grow over time. Everything is bound up with our ideas of what love should be and locked in place the moment we tie that knot in the wedding ceremony.

Perhaps a better way to think of our love, Takahashi Morris suggested, is as a pair of extended hands, resting flat, palm to palm against each other, gently. This way, the people in love are connected but are also able to move in their respective directions as life unfolds, gliding and dancing freely in tandem. They are present to provide support to each other but also to allow and honor the other to be who they are. As our minister described this, he slid his hands slowly up and down and around to demonstrate what this type of love looks like in motion. There is an elegance to this version of love, a grace, and a rhythm. “And when it comes to rest,” he said, stilling his hands in the position we often equate with prayer, what Buddhists call gassho, “it takes a form that is familiar to us all.”

Reflection: How Are You Attached to Love?

I invite you to pause here for a moment of reflection, perhaps taking up your pen and paper. Consider the ways in which you are attached to a particular idea of love. What do you think love should look like? Describe that with as many adjectives as you can. What does love require of you? What does your love expect of others? You might write down certain thoughts, words, or behaviors. What does your idea of love look like in action?

As usual, there are no right or wrong answers here. This is just a moment to notice what love means to you now and has probably meant to you for some time. It has likely served you well in many instances, perhaps not so well in others. That would be typical of the human experience. It certainly is of mine. So, abiding in your compassion, be honest with yourself and let the ideas flow just as they arise for you until you are comfortable you have exhausted them. This is just a practice of acknowledging.

Empty Love

The principles of understanding the emptiness of love are similar to the themes we have explored so far, particularly those relating to compassion. In this chapter we are just fine-tuning those teachings and practices to our more intimate relationships, the ones we share with those closest to us.

We can start by recognizing our traditional notion of ourselves and of all things and of everyone around us as containing a permanent, coherent self and leaves us irreconcilably separate from one another. This perceived separation invariably generates judgments about everything we encounter as serving or disserving, pleasant or unpleasant, attractive or repulsive. We find ourselves pursuing, often craving, those things we deem pleasant, driven primarily by the fear that we will not be successful in obtaining them or that, when we do, we will lose them.

When we live this way, though, we will never and can never be satisfied, because the things we seek do not have the qualities we ascribe to them. They are, in fact, impermanent and lacking a core, definitive self. We are chasing an illusion and thus always end up empty-handed. That is our suffering.

When it comes to love, this is often a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche jovially describes how, when we meet someone we are attracted to, we often act like a fool, contrary to our true selves and to our aspirations of achieving love. Our unsteadiness in such circumstances (of which, believe me, I am well aware) stems from the fact that we’re operating in a state of subtle aversion: the fear of losing the person we desire. It’s a very uncomfortable and unstable place from which to express love.

During a recent class I was teaching, we had a good laugh recalling the scene from the movie Swingers, when Mikey tries to resist the temptation to immediately phone a woman he has just met. He ends up calling her almost as soon as he gets home, and then calling back after the voicemail time expires, and then again to apologize for that, and then again to acknowledge that was weird, and then again and again and again. I suspect Mingyur Rinpoche would have a chuckle at that one too.

This is often not too far off from how we act, and it is okay. It’s helpful to take a look at ourselves and have a good laugh sometimes. This same spirit of attachment arises throughout the course of our loving relationships too, and on some of these occasions it is not so funny. Believing in our separateness and thus our perpetual imperfection and lacking, we seek others with the expectation that they can fill our void — we expect them to “complete us.” This is how we get caught in the trap of always trying to add more to ourselves, to others, and to our love.

The result: We might find ourselves in a full-throated scream at that person we love because they are somehow not living up to these unattainable expectations we have placed on them. Our insecurity has become a tornado, and we are redirecting the whirlwind their way. Or we might end up in deep despair because the object of our care has stopped loving us in return. We might feel ashamed, inadequate, and, again, isolated. We might begin to suspect that we are not capable of love and that neither are others.

And actually, we are right: No one can live up to the perfectionist ideas we have conjured about love when it is built on the foundation of separateness, craving, and attachment. Sadly, so often love is part of a tragic cycle: It begins with affectionate desire and ends with bitter aversion.

Once we start to see that this attitude about love does not actually serve us or those we care about, we might be open to turning toward the emptiness of love as a new path. What if we put down our preconceived ideas about love or how those who love each other should behave? What if we allowed this labyrinth of judgments to fade and we looked anew at the people around us? What if we remembered the underlying truth that each of us is always changing, preciously impermanent, and lacking any essential qualities that divide and distinguish us from one another? Could there be a moment when we pause and realize that we are growing from the same root, the source of all being that, lacking nothing, is always whole, complete, and indivisible? How do we love then?

The Art of Lessening Love

Embracing the way of lessening in our relationships means releasing our images and expectations of who others are and how they should act. Instead, we focus on our own truth and honor it by setting clearer boundaries around our zones of responsibility, meanwhile softening our attachments and dependencies. This integrity with ourselves is how we lessen and thereby realize love; it’s the antidote to the more-ing of others that results in harmful codependence and ties the immovable knot. So how do we distill our love so it can manifest authentically, honoring how we are all always changing and also fundamentally united at our root?

Step one, as is so often the case, is to simply and mindfully acknowledge what is. In that spirit, I offer you this definition of love: honoring our mutual freedom to come forth as we are. Love says, “I see you and I accept that you are you, doing what you do.” Our true friends, they say, are those who know us well and like us anyway. In those relationships, we are free to do us and they are free to do them. That’s love. Mutual respect and kindness ensue.

Setting healthy, mindful boundaries is the practice of freedom and the ultimate expression of love.

There are a variety of tools for developing this approach to love in our daily lives. Their common thread is the perhaps paradoxical recognition that setting healthy, mindful boundaries is the practice of freedom and the ultimate expression of love. Rather than cultivating our attachments to ideas of love as binding, fixed, and restrictive, we can open ourselves to genuine love that is unconditional and unbounded — the infinite love offered by our infinite selves in this infinite moment.

In our romantic relationships as with our other compassionate relationships, we can discover that we have space for it all: the joys and sorrows, the connected candlelight dinner, the argument about loading the dishwasher, the arrival of a new, exciting relationship, and the moving on of one whose time has passed. The tactile reality of two humans relating to one another won’t go away, but our capacity to be with it a bit more freely and easily can expand as love grows in that spacious abode.

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Excerpted from the book The Empty Path. Copyright © 2025 by Billy Wynne. Reprinted with permission from New World Library. www.newworldlibrary.com