Whenever I see or hear that someone is talking about love, I get twitchy. Love as a notion is so frequently evoked and exploited and commercialized and dogmatized that it has lost its meaning for most people.

Our country is now dominated by people whose love is argument and advantage.

Not real love. I was thinking a lot about love on my walk in the woods with Fate and Zinnia. I can think so comfortably in the woods, I always feel the trees egging me on.

C’mon, man, you can think!

“To love another is to will what is good for him or her,” writes Thomas Merton in No Man Is An Island.

Merton might have added that political love – as in loving a politician –  is rarely love.

True love is based on truth, a willingness to offer it, an openness to accepting it. Until I learned to accept myself, I could not and did not love anyone, even my daughter.

For many years, I was her caretaker and calendar keeper, her shopper and feeder, her seven days a week Uber. But this was for me, I came to learn, not her. As I began to take on my flaws and faults, I came to see that real love was different. I was loving Emma for me, not her, out of my needs, not her needs.

It was false love, it was about me, not her.

She didn’t need a fraction of the things I bought for her, did for her, drove her to, urged her to do. In therapy, I developed a better idea of what love is, and this opened the way for me to love Maria and accept her love for me.

Emma and I have also come to a richer and warmer place. I want her to live her life happily apart from me, not because of me. And she is.

This distinction – between selfless and selfish love – was one of the most challenging lessons of my life. But as I have come to learn what love is, I take it more seriously; it has become a sacred thing with me, nothing to roll my eyes about anymore, something to celebrate and honor.

I know a man who is off work for three days a week. He insists that his wife be with him almost every minute of those days, he says it is because he loves her. She is reluctant to say no, even though it is not something she needs.

She also believes it is love for her to agree.

But to me, that is not love in the way I know it.

Maria must have her own time, her own life, her work, her own walks in the woods, her own time to read her own books, her own chair. I would feel suffocated if she needed to spend all of her free time with me or expected me to do the same. Love is not just about need or control.

A lot of men I know are confused about what equality means. Equality is not a political aspiration, not when it comes to love. Equality is the foundation of love; domination is the cancer and poison.

And love is never, to me, unconditional. In our wedding vows, we agreed to walk away from one another if we ever fell out of love.

Love seeks one thing only: the good of the loved. When we were climbing out of bankruptcy, and I was locked in hard negotiations with our bank, I told them I would never accept a mortgage that Maria could not afford if I died first.

We went back and forth for weeks on that, but I won that struggle, the only fight with a bank I ever won.

She told me later – she didn’t know about it at the time – that is was one of the most loving things she had experienced.

I was beginning to learn.

When I was grumbling and mumbling about being stuck in our house for weeks at a stretch due to the virus, I saw the pain and fear in Maria at the idea that I might get sick and die, and so I began to pay real and close attention to what I needed to do to be safe.

She was showing me her real love for me, and I needed to respect that and do the same.

A love that loves blindly and unconditionally and merely for the sake of love is a kind of hatred in my mind, rather than love.

To love unconditionally and blindly is to love selfishly. That kind of love is forced; it takes the responsibility away to lovers to think of each other, rather than take each other for granted.

It doesn’t have to face the truth, and never considers that it might go astray or get derailed. It only cares about itself.

I moved away from my family in 2003 and bought a farm in upstate New York because I wanted to live there and write there. I never considered that I was beginning the final destruction of my family’s life together.

That’s what the absence of conditions can do to a relationship.

I cannot imagine buying a farm 300 miles away from Maria and moving there for a few years to write a book. If she didn’t stab me through the heart, she would just leave or kick me out of the farmhouse.

She would be right. I  hope I would do the same.

Love is a powerful glue; to have it, you must step out of yourself again and again and into the heart of someone else. I think about that every day, not once in a while. I think it’s so easy for love to slip away and become habit or obligation.

I always wondered about the people who told me they never saw the end of their marriages coming until it was upon them. I never saw my divorce coming; neither did my wife. We just assumed our love and commitment was unconditional. We never saw the truth coming. We never wanted the truth.

I don’t expect Maria ever to love me, unconditionally. I want to earn her love and need her love and work to keep her love. I want to be afraid of losing it, not arrogant about keeping it.

There ought to be many conditions on being loved or loving.

Love, to me, is about one thing only: the good of the one loved.

Thanks to the trees for egging me on.