Article XXVII — When Love Is No Longer a Need — Anton Jayasuriya

There seems to be a curious thing that happens as people become more spiritually conscious: they often feel less need to have a partner.

This can easily be mistaken for withdrawal from love. Perhaps it is something quite different.

Much of what we ordinarily call the desire for partnership contains an element of need. We want someone who will reassure us that we matter, someone who will witness our lives, someone who will protect us from loneliness. We seek another person who will, in some fashion, make us complete.

There is nothing wrong with this. It is part of the human experience. But spiritual consciousness gradually changes the place from which we experience ourselves.

As we become aware that we are not isolated fragments of existence, the desperate search for completion begins to diminish. If consciousness is ultimately an expression of the Monad, then we were never quite as alone as we imagined ourselves to be.

And with that realization comes an important distinction.

Loneliness says: something is absent.

Solitude says: nothing is absent, although someone else would still be welcome.

This does not necessarily diminish our capacity for love. It may actually enlarge it.

When another person is no longer required to make us whole, we become capable of meeting them without silently demanding that they fill the empty places within us. Love becomes less possessive because there is less fear beneath it.

The old form of love says:

I need you because without you I am incomplete.

The freer form says:

I do not need you to complete me. I choose to share myself with you.

Perhaps this is why spiritually conscious people sometimes become comfortable without partners. They have not necessarily rejected intimacy. They have simply discovered that intimacy and dependency are not the same thing.

There is, however, an important caution.

Isolation is not automatically enlightenment. A person may withdraw because they have been disappointed, wounded, frightened, or simply grown tired of the complications of relationships. We should not mistake every preference for solitude for spiritual attainment.

The difference may be quite simple.

The wounded person says, I don’t want anyone.

The lonely person says, I need someone.

The spiritually independent person may be able to say, I need no one—and yet I am free to love everyone.

Perhaps, then, spiritual consciousness does not lead us away from love.

It leads us away from need disguised as love.

And when the need falls away, something rather beautiful becomes possible.

We can stop searching for someone to complete us and begin meeting others as complete beings themselves.

Then love is no longer an attempt to fill an absence.

It becomes a gift freely given.