Why is it so difficult to find love today? What has the age of computers and smartphones done to our ability to connect with others? Also, what remains with us from our first love throughout our lives?
Animals do not make mistakes in choosing mates. Instincts guide them in finding the best partners. We humans have freedom in this matter, and because of that, a great deal of confusion as well. On one hand, we need sex on the physical level. On the other hand, we have a desire for an inner connection. We move between these two desires, sometimes connecting them and sometimes separating them. We do not know how to successfully combine them.
In days gone by, love was something reserved mainly for the aristocracy. It was a kind of pastime for people who wanted to show that they were more worthy and more capable of conquest. The masses had nothing to do with such games. People were preoccupied with basic survival and married someone with a similar background, who did not introduce surprises or complications, who seemed capable of taking care of the household and children.
In the 20th century, the ego grew, movies about love appeared, songs about excitement and passion became popular, and the world came to belong to young lovers. Today, only a few generations later, relationships have already encountered existential difficulties. How many loving couples do you know? How many of them will divorce within a few years?
In the technological age, we sit in front of computers all day and live inside our smartphones. We have no interest in someone confronting us face-to-face. We prefer that they write to us, because it helps us feel protected. Even when we enter a relationship, we find it difficult to strip away our coverings, the screens that separate us. It is difficult to be emotionally exposed and open with our partners. Indeed, we might not even know ourselves deeply enough to be clear about who we are and what we want to achieve in life.
The more sophisticated the world becomes, the more primitive the human being becomes. It is as though we merge into the computer, which operates according to bits of zero or one. No harmony, no feelings, nothing. Everything is mechanical, cold, and purely practical. This is the source of the great difficulty we experience today in building relationships in general and romantic relationships in particular.
In such a reality, we need to learn from the very beginning what love is. Remember how our mother loved us when we were little? How attached we were to her?
Later, our first love entered our lives. We felt alive with full intensity. Emotions, energies, disappointments, and hopes. It gave us an example of how a person needs nothing other than a mutual, deep, inner connection. We saw that we can do anything to receive a response, some sign of affection from the object of our love. That is all we want, and they are all we think about. They fill our entire horizon and are all we can see.
From then until today, we do not look for partners who are compatible with us, but long for a similar feeling of inner connection, something that will fill the empty place that has remained in our heart and mind ever since. This empty place accompanies us throughout our lives, driving us into all kinds of pursuits and searches. It is what moves us from within.
This place is called “the soul,” and it can be filled only through connecting with others in love. At the foundation of the soul are a masculine part and a feminine part that unite as one, and around them everything develops in the direction of connection, complementarity, and love.
Therefore, the first step in building a good relationship is to become that boy or girl again, to strip away the artificial coverings, that is, the patterns of thought, attitudes, and behavior that we have absorbed from Hollywood culture, television programs, and social media. We need to put aside everything that has been pushed into our heads, to be more natural, more ourselves, simpler, and to begin seriously learning how to build deep inner connections.
Overall, a relationship is a joint effort. We need to know how to adapt ourselves to our partners, how to draw closer together, how to enter into one another, and how to become included in one another until we reach a level at which we are like one. This is a spiritual, inner union between our mutual desires to do good to one another.
A true connection is ultimately possible only according to the principle, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Each person gives and, by doing so, makes room within themselves to receive from the other. This is how, together, we can ascend higher and higher through the degrees of love, all the way to the summit of human development. I wish us all success in this endeavor.
Based on “New Life 197 – Falling in Love, Part 1” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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