Can love — something we usually think of as an emotion — also be wise? Can reason have a place in love when love itself can feel so instinctive and overwhelming?
For me, wise love begins with a form of selfishness. A healthy, constructive selfishness: loving yourself first. Not narcissism, and not blind admiration, but the kind of self-love that gives us enough inner resources that we can genuinely want to share them with other people. It is the familiar oxygen-mask principle: take care of your own breathing first, and then you are in a position to help someone else. Wise love starts with giving to ourselves and caring for ourselves before we try to pour everything into others.
That is the foundation. From there, we can build.
I also see something deeply Stoic in wise love. One of the central Stoic ideas is that some things are within our control and others are not — and that fighting what we cannot control only creates suffering. Another person belongs firmly in that second category. A partner, child, parent or friend is a separate human being, with an inner world, values and beliefs of their own. If we cannot accept that, we can spend our relationships trying to make another person think, feel and behave the way we would prefer.
Another part of loving wisely is accepting change and impermanence as natural parts of life. Biological, emotional and spiritual change are unavoidable. Something has to end for something new to emerge. When we experience change only as loss, it can become deeply painful — especially when we fight to preserve something that was never meant to remain unchanged forever. And once again, we arrive at the Stoic question: what is actually within my control?
In a partnership, we may long for the romance of the beginning. As parents, we may miss the small child for whom we were once the most important and wisest people in the world. In our relationship with our own parents, we may miss being held and cared for. If we see every ending as something we must somehow recover, we will suffer. But if we recognise that a stage of life gave us something, shaped us, and then ended to make room for what comes next, curiosity becomes possible again.
One source of suffering in relationships is the unsuccessful attempt to change another person.
As parents, we can try endlessly to influence our children so they think as we do or want what we want for them. We say we want them to be happy, while at the same time repeatedly trying to “fix” them — which can quietly communicate that we do not believe they are already enough. We call it raising them. We call it educating them. But is that always what we are really doing?
My own view of parenting changed profoundly through the work of the Danish family therapist Jesper Juul. His books challenged me to look at the relationship between parent and child in a very different way.
And what do we do in romantic relationships? Do we not sometimes try to improve our partners just a little? Do we become irritated when they do not respond or behave the way we think they should?
Then there is the relationship we have with ourselves. Do we look at ourselves with love and acceptance? Do we allow ourselves to make mistakes? Do we care for ourselves physically and mentally? Can we accept that we are changing — and take joy and wisdom from those changes — or are we constantly trying to repair ourselves too? If the story we tell ourselves is full of negative beliefs, suffering becomes almost inevitable.
Instead of turning inward with reflection and self-compassion, we may begin looking outside ourselves for the reason we feel bad. We may diminish other people to feel better about ourselves. We may try to change everyone around us so that, in them, we can finally see what we wish we could see in the mirror.
So, to me, wise love is love that makes room for the fact that everything changes. We change. Our partners change. Our children change. Loving wisely means that rather than fighting to remake another person — or endlessly remake ourselves — we can observe, learn and receive. Every person may have something to teach us. And we can also receive a great deal from ourselves when we learn to value, accept and love the person looking back at us in the mirror.