Can Love Be a Path to Happiness

T: Is love the path to happiness?

N: Is love the path to happiness?

T: Loving your family, loving your dogs…

N: So just the nature of love, in general?

T: Yeah. Does that bring happiness, at the end of the day?

N: Well, the short answer is absolutely not. Because the common phenomenon of love is inseparable from attachment. But if you’re not attached to something, you’re not loving it. So the whole notion of ‘unconditional love’, it’s a contradiction in terms. You’re either unconditionally bound with it, or you’re emotionally divorced from it, which means you don’t love it, which means you’re not attached to it. So, in itself, love is a bond. You can make it as abstract and divine as you want, it’s still a bond. Because it still has its object. Which means there is still some sort of attachment, to a degree. But actually, that’s just people’s fantasy very often, when they talk about unconditional love. It’s an abstract ideal and, in practice, love is even worse. It’s always mixed with infatuation, with lust, with delight, with conceit, with pride, with everything else. That’s basically what love is.

T: Passion.

N: Passion, of course, inseparable from passion.

T: That’s why you can kill at the same time, for love.

N: Well, I’m sure that people who try to justify their love, they would think that, yeah.

T: So trying to have unconditional love for everything…

N: Yeah, that is just an ideal basically, that’s a contradiction in terms. Because love, be it even unconditional, is a relationship. It means you are relating yourself to these things, which means to that extent, you’re bound by them. So it’s impossible to have unconditional love. If it’s unconditional, it means there is no condition, there is no relationship. But love is a relationship. So it’s basically saying ‘the unconditionally conditioned’. That’s what unconditional love would be. Or to have a relationship with no relationship. That’s just a contradiction in terms. So you can find poetic value in saying contradictory terms, but in itself, in practise, and phenomenologically speaking, it makes absolutely no sense. You’re either bound, or you’re free from the bond.

T: So, is love virtuous? Is it a virtue?

N: Well, it depends, but… no, no. I mean, love can be wholesome, that’s why I’m sort of slow in answering, love can be wholesome in the sense of, it’s not necessarily infatuated passion, and lust, and greed involved with it. But as a bond, as something that is fundamentally still is rooted in a degree of passion and emotion, it is unwholesome. From the point of view of enlightenment, it is unwholesome. It’s an obstacle, basically. It’s a bond that you need to break.

T: It’s an attachment.

N: Yeah. Love or hate, basically. If you want to be free from suffering, or if you want to develop your mind to its full potential, so to speak, the potential of freedom, both must be abandoned equally. Both love and hate.

T: So love cannot bring happiness?

N: It can bring worldly happiness, which from the ultimate point of view, it’s not happiness, obviously.