Does Unconditional Love Exist Between Two Partners

By Michael Laitman

Unconditional love can exist between two partners if they work on it and attain it.

Love is based on mutual concessions, yielding to one another, and finding joy in doing so. When we love our partner, then we have no demands for any special attention or care from them. Instead, we enjoy the pleasure we receive from sacrificing ourselves for their sake.

Such pleasure is similar to the feeling of satisfaction that we get when we give something to our children. However, our children are naturally closer to us because we feel them as parts of us. With our partners, though, we are separate in our desires and opinions, but by correcting the love between us, then we can bridge that separation.

By nature, we focus mostly on our own desires with little regard for our partner’s. In other words, we relate to our own desires with a higher level of importance than to our partner’s desires. In order to shift from this nature-given self-centered state to a state of love, we need to merge our desires so that they adhere as a single desire. In the wisdom of Kabbalah, this condition for achieving love is described with the phrase, “Make your desire like His, so He would make His desire like yours.” Such love discusses the love that we achieve between the creation, which is a desire to enjoy, and the Creator—the source force of love, bestowal and connection. By adhering our desires into a single desire, when we prioritize fulfilling the desires of others over our own desires, we then reach a state that Kabbalah describes as “husband and wife, and Divinity between them.” That is, we require the force of love itself to enter our connections in order for us to be able to truly love others, to aim to benefit others outwardly with no wish to receive anything in return.

Achieving such love requires connection-enriching education. That is, we need to place ourselves under the influence of learning, guidance, exercises as well as social, cultural and media influences that describe the nature, need and importance of reaching a state of love.

We need to understand that the use of our loved ones and families in order to primarily benefit ourselves ultimately brings about neither joy nor love. The sole way of finding true and lasting fulfillment is to learn how to love correctly—where we prioritize benefiting others over self-benefit, and where we become willing to concede our own desires for the sake of fulfilling the desires of others.

We can bring joy to others and to ourselves by giving endlessly. This altruistic modus operandi would act as a source of everlasting fulfillment. That is, by aiming ourselves in the direction of fulfilling others, we place ourselves into a cycle that positively boomerangs back to us with feelings of absolute and eternal love, as well as eternal life. Instead of trying to consume everything for ourselves, we can bring life to everyone around us with our love. Doing so would enable us to ascend to a higher dimension where we experience Heaven on Earth—an eternal and perfect life.

Regarding our partners, we should shift our focus from searching for love to building love. We need to stop expecting people to act in extraordinary ways toward us, and instead find partners who share a common goal and understanding of what true love is. We can then enter the process of learning and exercising the achievement of true love together with our partners.