How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly

Being an adult in love means being adult about love and loving. Psychological adulthood—maturity—is letting love in carefully and showing it responsibly. Spiritual adulthood consists of expanding our love so that it is unbounded, a practice requiring recklessness. Since love sits in us someplace between trust and fear, a commitment to love requires

We simply notice it with bare attention and keep returning to the present moment by focusing on our breath, what is real right now. In mindfulness, we are so attentive to our thoughts and reactions that we see precisely where they lead and how they do or do not produce suffering for ourselves and others.

“I need someone” plus “You are desirable and available” can feel like: “I am in love with you.”

The Greek philosopher Aristotle proposed three bases for friendship. A friendship can be based on utility, as in being friends with our next door neighbor whom we may need someday. A friendship can be based on pleasure, as happens when we have a buddy whose company we enjoy and with whom we have interests in common. And a friendship can be what Ari

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

Practice is about surrendering to the way things are inside us. Our success is in noticing how our mind works and in coming back to our breath whenever we become aware of our distractions. Our success is in continuing to show up, not in being utterly free of distracting mind-sets.

LOVE IS TOO ELUSIVE and individualized to permit a definition. However, we can ask, “What can love be?” This is not a definition but a request for an ever-renewed invitation, something we can keep daring to enter, like Alice persevering in her adventures in Wonderland.

In fact, a crush is painful, so in spiritual consciousness, we may feel compassion for the person who obsesses about us in that way.

Giving and receiving love can become our primary life focus. Focusing on this combination is a way to become fully human, to fulfill ourselves psychologically. If love comes our way, it is welcome and enriching. But in spiritual practice, our focus is on giving love rather than finding someone from whom to receive it. We feel fulfilled spiritually