Love: Is It or Isn’t It All You Need?

In one of their most famous songs, The Beatles promise, “All you need is love.” And as reassuring and romantic and positively lovely as that idea sounds, the skeptic in me has doubted the validity of that promise. Especially when I listen to some lyrics in a song by Patty Smyth and Don Henley—“Baby, sometimes love just ain’t enough.” So for heaven’s sake, which one is it? Is or isn’t love all you need?

When a relationship falls into hard times, I've tended to bounce back and forth between these two catchy sets of lyrics, using one to justify staying and the other to justify leaving. So in my quest to figure out which one is right, I’ve turned to other sources of wisdom for some guidance.

American Psychiatrist and author David Viscott says, “To love and to be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.” The thing I’ve always liked about this quote is the phrasing—to love, to be loved. What stands out to me is the semantics. To Viscott, love isn’t a feeling or an emotion; rather, it is an act that a lover must do constantly. In other words, to love and to be loved, as verbs, require action from both parties. The lover must DO love, and the beloved must RECEIVE love; this is to feel the sun from both sides.

So how do we do this love thing? One of my favorite books is The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts by Gary D. Chapman, who tells readers that in love, there are languages, five, to be exact, as follows: quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. Chapman’s book helps you figure out your main love language, and that of your partner’s, and then you can together “speak” to your lover in his or her preferred love language. The problem here, I think, is that the book stops short. When I read this book years ago, I thought to myself, why would I only develop the one language that my partner speaks rather than developing them all to become an expert at loving? Ambitious thought? Perhaps. But if love is a do-ing, then why not do more of all five expressions of love? Wouldn’t practicing all five cultivate that to love action? In this line of thinking, love is something more than just felt; it is something that becomes part of who we are.

A few days ago, a friend posted a link to a book review on Thich Nhat Hanh’s How to Love. I was intrigued immediately because there it was again—love as an act. After reading the book, which is so full of wisdom that I would highly recommend it to anyone, I believed Hanh illuminated the hidden truth about love just by using a simple comparison: “The moment love stops growing, it begins to die. It’s like a tree; if a tree stops growing, it begins to die. We can learn how to feed our love and help it continue to grow” (13). Comparing a love relationship to a tree resonated with me (partly because I see trees as teachers in life, partly because the concept of cultivation/growth rings true, hence the title of this blog). What I get from this quote is this: in order to have true love, there has to be an act of love performed on a regular basis. Without this act, the love will die. In this way, to have a relationship that exists in true love requires constant care and tending. To relinquish that duty is to choose to let the love die, as the tree would die without water.

Taking this comparison into consideration with the five love languages, it makes sense to merge these two teachings. The watering happens via the love languages. Aha! There it is. But can it be so simple? What if there’s still more? And this is where I think the fun begins. Since every person is unique and thus every love relationship is unique, every couple has the chance to become seekers of other methods of watering—to find as many methods as possible. Building this arsenal of personalized watering systems means that as a couple, you get to design your partnership, tailor it to help both people be in full bloom all the time. Thinking about this, what a gift it would be for both parties, moves me beyond words.

So…water the tree, use the love languages to do so, explore other methods, be in full bloom. Okay. And then one more thing occurs to me, and this isn’t from a book. For a true love to flourish, it requires the constant watering, yes, but it also requires exclusive watering. What I mean is that there has to be a covenant to not water other romantic trees. It may seem obvious at first, but what I think is less obvious is that we often find little forms of watering harmless in the beginning, until suddenly there are two trees—one flourishing, one thirsty. So we must be careful where we water.  

My reconciliation of The Beatles and Smyth/Henley is that both are right. “All you need is love”… yes, assuming that the lovers consistently work toward a true and expansive love. And “Baby, sometimes love just ain’t enough”… yes, assuming that at least one party is unwilling to do constant watering.

As always, I share these musings in hopes that some of what has inspired me in trying to understand it all will also inspire you. And if you are so inspired, then here’s to a lifetime of becoming, and then being, constant gardeners.