Love Is Not an Emotion

The most misunderstood word in the English language is love. We use it to describe everything from our feeling about pizza to the most sacred bond between two human beings. We treat it as an emotion — something that rises and falls, that can be lost, that depends on the behavior of others. But love in its true nature is none of these things.

Love as a Force

A Course in Miracles teaches — and my own 50 years of study confirms — that Love is not an emotion. Love is the fundamental force of reality. It is what God is. It is what we are, beneath the layers of ego, fear, and misidentification that cover our true nature.

An emotion fluctuates. An emotion depends on circumstances. An emotion can be manipulated, damaged, lost. A Force is none of these things. Gravity does not fluctuate based on how you feel about it. Electromagnetism does not withdraw when you are behaving badly. Love, as a Force, operates the same way — consistently, totally, without condition or withdrawal.

The love that fluctuates — that rises when someone treats us well and collapses when they hurt us — that is not Love. That is a need dressed in the costume of love.

What Mary Jo Taught Me

When Mary Jo died, I discovered something that terrified me at first: my love for her did not diminish. It did not recede with time. It did not become past tense. That seemed wrong to me — the world told me that grief was supposed to fade, that I was supposed to 'move on,' that love for someone who has died was supposed to soften into memory.

But it didn't. It became clearer. More essential. As if her physical absence had stripped away everything unnecessary and left only what was real.

I eventually understood that this was the nature of real Love. It cannot be ended by physical death because it is not a physical phenomenon. It belongs to what A Course in Miracles calls the Real World — the world that exists beneath the projected world of the ego. That Love is what I write about. That Love is what I want every reader to find.