Real love is agony

There are many, many incredible things about The Beatles.

More musical and knowledgeable people than me have analysed their contribution to culture and can explain the genius that lies behind their music, words and longevity. For me - born in the same building as John Lennon - their scouse-ness means they occupy a special place in my heart but there is something else. They speak - almost universally - in their music about love. They are obsessed with one of our basic needs as humans: to love and be loved.

That need, something I talk about with clients in almost every session, directly or indirectly, has been on my mind all the time recently. It has led me to reflect deeply on one aspect of love: the pain it brings. The gut-wrenching agony of loving somebody completely; of caring so much about somebody that it hurts; of feeling so deeply about somebody that any pain they feel is felt in your own body; of the despair when the love we need is not provided; the loss of love when we lose somebody to death.

Love is beauty but love is also pain. Deep, cavernous, heart-breaking pain.

This week, a reminder.

I had an issue at my daughter’s school. A message I had passed to school about the time I was picking my daughter up wasn’t passed on to her teacher, or to my daughter, and it led to her waiting for me at normal pick-up time and being worried and upset that I wasn’t there. It was a mix-up which was quickly sorted and we were reunited within a few minutes but it hit me hard. Why?

The pain she felt in that moment - a moment in which the love she needed (the love of being there, the wave across the playground, the hug of welcome and the feeling of being wanted and seen) wasn’t provided. When I discovered her pain - from a phone call from the teacher who was in the dark about the arrangements I had made with the school office two hours earlier - put me into immediate pain. The pain of knowing my daughter had been in pain; the pain of feeling I had let her down (even though I hadn’t); the pain of feeling accused (which I wasn’t being) of not being a good parent and therefore not showing enough love; the pain of wanting more than anything to be with her, to hold her, soothe her, be there for there and not being there; the pain of the memory of me, the same age, waiting and waiting and waiting to be collected by my unpunctual father and feeling unwanted, forgotten, not important, not enough.

I feel tears in my eyes now writing that - 34 years later. That pain of missing the love I needed in that moment cut me so deep that I still cannot recall it without re-living its pain now. The many, many times in my life - at different stages - I haven’t had the love I needed, and the work I have done with my current therapist to reach out to that little boy and young man who needed more love than he received. The opportunity I was given by my therapist to speak to that little boy - I wrote him several letters and read them out loud to her - was one of the most profound experiences of my life. An experience that brought me the rawest joy and deepest sadness.

I am blessed to have real love in my life. Love that knows no limit and no end. Love that is present and past. Love of those here and those gone. That real love isn’t all joy, it is sadness too. It is the agony of shared pain as well as shared happiness.

John and Paul knew about real love, and, as with so much of their work, they found the words to explain it.

“Just like little girls and boys

Playing with their little toys

Seems like all they really were doing

Was waiting for love

From this moment on I know

Exactly where my life will go

Seems that all I really was doing

Was waiting for love.”