Love ‘n’ Labels

What would it mean to love without a label? Be loved without a label?
Yesterday I was reading up a blog site … a link which a friend sent to me, which I continued to follow. And this person wrote something which struck me very deeply. He/ She said …
I have no idea how it feels to be utterly loved.
I am the place a person falls to when life gets hard. I am the shoulder, the keeper of secrets, the kindness through their pain. I am the wisdom, the knowledge, the prophet when everything goes wrong.
I have no idea how it feels to love utterly. Or be utterly loved.
I would go one step further and say that I have never utterly loved either.
This could apply to each and every one of us. We have always loved and been loved with labels – daughter/son, sister/brother, wife/husband, mother/father, friend, teacher, lover, confidante, boss, professional, personal, family … etc.etc.
Never have we ever experienced love in its purest form, without a ‘label’.
The label creates an expectation of a certain behaviour. It establishes boundaries – which keeps people firmly in their places. And it becomes impossible to cross these boundaries – not because of social taboos – but also because within oneself there is disturbance. The social taboos are easy to cross. It is after all external to us. It’s the internal ones that are so impossible to surmount.
It makes us measure, compare, check whether we are ‘behaving’, ‘giving’ ‘taking’ etc. what we are ‘allowed’ …
It completely takes away the spontaneity of loving.
When one feels love, at its origin there is no label. One just feels. It can feel many things – it can be warm, cool, soothing, intense, fiery, joyful …etc. Yet before it is completely born, before it completely blossoms, we twist it, adapt it, and stick a label on it.
We completely take away the spontaneity of loving.
We no longer are a recipient or a giver of love – but ‘become’ a label. The label makes us feel safe. We know what to expect from it. For if we remove the label, and love goes its way, how are we going to express this? How are we going to manage it, handle it? And before we can really love, we have feared it. It is incredible how much we fear love. In its purest form it demands a vulnerability of us that we are not willing to give. It demands trust. It demands us to be Skinless. Inside-Out, upside-down.
We find ourselves incapable of fulfilling the demands of love.
– Radha Kunke