Eros, longing, intimacy, devotion
The Lover is not only about romance. She is the pulse of eros itself the life-force that longs for union.
Eros lives in the body’s ache for touch, in the artist’s longing to create, in the seeker’s yearning for God, in the parent’s devotion to a child. Wherever there is desire to merge with life, the Lover is present.
But the Lover also carries danger. When she is cut off from her own source, longing becomes addiction, devotion becomes self-abandonment, and intimacy becomes possession.
Eros and the Field of Belonging
In systemic therapy, we see how intimacy is not just between two people it is shaped by the field we were born into. How we love is deeply influenced by what we received, or did not receive, from our first loves: mother and father.
The mother’s embrace teaches the child how to receive. The father’s presence teaches the child how to reach. When either is interrupted, our experience of eros can twist into seeking what was missing, rather than sharing what is whole.
Unconsciously, we may seek mother in the beloved, hoping to be held without condition. We may seek father in the beloved, longing for direction and protection. But no partner can carry the weight of those rivers. When they do, love bends into dependency, and intimacy fractures under the strain of ancestral longing.
True intimacy begins when we recognise these hidden loyalties and release the beloved from being the parent we lost. In systemic work, this shift is profound:
“You are not my mother, you are not my father. You are my beloved. And in you, I see only you.”
Holy Yearning vs. Hungry Longing
The Lover’s path is to learn the difference between hunger and holy yearning. Hunger grasps, clings, demands. Holy yearning is spacious it draws us deeper into life itself.
When we follow hunger, we lose ourselves in the other. When we follow holy yearning, intimacy becomes a revelation: a meeting of two souls who dare to be fully seen.
The Lover is not destroyed by longing she is shaped by it. For longing, when purified, is not a wound but a prayer.
The Surrender
In truth, eros asks not for conquest but for surrender. Not to possess, but to dissolve.
To walk the Lover’s path is to allow ourselves to be undone. To risk the vulnerability of saying: “Here I am, all of me will you meet me here?” It is to let the flame of devotion burn hot enough to illuminate but not consume.
The Lover reminds us that we are not meant to touch life lightly. We are meant to be altered by it.
Personal Reflection
When I sit with my own longing, I notice the places it turns to hunger. The times I have asked love to fill a void that no one else could. The moments I mistook devotion for disappearing.
And then I notice where my longing feels holy. The ache to create. The tenderness that rises when I watch my children sleep. The intimacy of silence with a beloved who truly sees me.
The Lover in me whispers: “Do not fear being undone. Life does not want your mask. It wants your surrender.”
And so I let eros teach me not how to cling, but how to open. Not how to demand, but how to dissolve into something greater than myself.
