Free Love

"I’m curious about the way you conceive this way of loving: you have one major partner who you love the most and the others are just people you desire, or you love all the sexual partners? For me, erotic love appears in the relationship between two persons, and cannot be shared because you desire the one you love and love the one you desire."

If we were advocating ‘free love’ as a substitute for ‘monogamy’ – as if it were the ‘right’ thing then that would, by inference, mean that we were criticising absolutely everyone who is in a monogamous relationship as if they were making the ‘wrong’ choice. That’s not what either of us is doing.

As far as I am concerned, I have only advocated awareness, deep questioning of our motivations, and the recognition that Love is essentially co-existent with Freedom. Where there is no willingness to both live and to offer Freedom, there is no Love… there may be ‘attachment’ – an overwhelming desire to be connected with the other, but the inherent feeling of connection – the Love itself – is not there. 

Actually, to be fair, it’s not such a clear ‘black’ & ‘white’ situation. I’m not saying that anyone who experiences attachment is incapable of feeling Love – I’m just saying that we can’t feel both at the same time. We’re all capable of both Love and fear and we tend to have moments of Love which we then try to protect and nurture in fear but it doesn’t work. Love can only be nurtured and honoured by Love.

Just as I am stating that ‘morally’-enforced monogamy may not really work in a healthy way, I would say exactly the same about ‘morally’-enforced polygamy, polyamory, etc. I am basically saying that Love should be allowed to dictate the rules, not our concepts and social habits.

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I understand if you’re wondering whether there isn’t first of all a desire for ‘sexual freedom’ being expressed here and then secondly, resulting from that, an argument put forward to justify it which involves some self-delusion about the nature of love, desire, selfishness, frustration and reaffirmation of the ego. There is no doubt that ‘free love’ could be favoured in order to defend an immature and shallow way of relating to people, however ‘monogamy’ can be defended for exactly the same reasons – to simply protect our comfort zones and live in a way that requires the least consciousness.

So, what you’re bringing up is very important – and it relates basically to honesty with oneself – integrity.
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The monogamy that you describe in your relationship is apparently not enforced from outside or by conditioning. It is therefore, as I understand it, actually ‘Free Love’… except that your way of seeing things seems to imply that as soon as you or your partner have any inkling of sexual attraction for anyone else, then you must no longer love each other. That could create unnecessary pressure on both of you. It would create the idea of ‘duty’. It becomes one’s duty not to feel sexual attraction for someone else otherwise it would be taken as a violation of your relationship – a violation of your love itself.

Usually when people say they are ‘in love’ what they are describing is an obsession with one person who has become the object of all their attention. They are ‘fixated’. This has its pleasant moments and its devastating disappointments – because what tends to happen is that we make an unreasonable demand on our partner... we demand that our partner be ‘perfect’ – and this usually means that we want them to be always exactly as we thought they were when we ‘fell in love’.

If however, in your relationship (as an example) you both Freely accept whatever arises in yourselves and in your relationship as being perfect, and therefore inherently acceptable and worthy of respect, simply because it is being experienced and expressed by someone you love, then there is no pressure for things to remain exactly as they are… Things either do remain as they are, or they don’t, but the love is unconditional. It is not limited to or based on a predefined situation.
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If I have anything of value to share here it is that Love really is Freedom. 

I’m not equating ‘love’ and ‘lust’. I wouldn’t say that there’s no such thing as lust, but I would suggest that we may be able to understand it and respond to it without the fear – or the compulsion – and without the superstitious attitude that we tend to see it with. ‘Lust’ is pure sexual desire. It is not based on more subtle elements such as ‘empathy’, but that doesn’t make it necessarily a problem. ‘Lust’ – it is true – can be expressed as brute, selfish force, but it can also be expressed as passion and can give way to Love – especially if it is embraced without the self-judgment that would tend to make us feel like ‘bad’ people for experiencing it in the first place. The problem here is that as soon as we get caught up in severe self-judgement we feel alienated, and our ability to empathise with others, to respect them and be sensitive to them, is impaired. 

My understanding is that most sexual abuse, and even other forms of abuses of power, are a direct result of unresolved conflict caused by sexual repression rather than as a result of insufficient repression. So our taboos, our laws and our moral impositions are not enough to heal our psyche, our society, our world.

Any thought, emotion, impulse or experience that arises and which is judged as ‘bad’ will cause internal conflict if it is acknowledged. So what often happens is that it is not acknowledged – a whole part of our psyche remains ‘unconscious’ specifically for this reason – we have banished it. But it doesn’t disappear and the very fact that the thought, emotion, impulse or experience is ‘not allowed’ makes it a source of fascination for the ‘unconscious’ mind, which will look desperately for ways of resolving the mystery and internal conflict which still exists, but only at a deeper level.

So, when I say “Love Is Freedom”, that doesn’t mean simply ‘freedom of the ego to do as it pleases’ or ‘freedom for temptation to do as it pleases with us’ or ‘freedom for impulsive desires to run free and take over our lives’…

Perhaps you would agree that worrying ‘religiously’ about temptation comes from a deep fear, a sense of division in oneself and the belief that we constantly have to be a certain way in order to be ‘worthy’ of love. Our relationship with our parents begins this conditioning and religious ‘education’ tends to reinforce it – we are even led to believe that God doesn’t love us unconditionally, so then how could we, ‘mortal sinners’, possibly love each other unconditionally?

But Love is Freedom. When we are not feeling insecure we simply don’t tend to impose regulations and no effort is required to love unconditionally.

Of course the fact is that most of us, most of the time, feel some degree of insecurity. So we deal with this by imposing limitations and regulations on everything we possibly can – starting with ourselves and then projecting this to the ‘objects of our love’ and to the whole society.
Then we think that love consists in protecting each other’s egos because we know how unpleasant it is when our own ego is hurt. This is what most people mean by ‘honouring our partner’s feelings’. I am suggesting taking this a little further and together – in a loving partnership – committing to releasing one’s insecurity and all one’s fears and supporting one’s partner and their commitment to do the same…
This should not be taken as an excuse for abusing the partner’s feelings! This is a very delicate process and cannot be forced.

Life itself will guide the process – our assistance is not really required. All that we need to do is Love unconditionally.

The ‘Free Love’ that I speak of is not an ‘alternative system’, it is not a ‘technique’ for greater pleasure or for better relationships, it is just a realisation of how things really are. The nature of Love is Freedom – that is my starting point. The rest of what I am writing here is a re-consideration of everything that I ever thought was true in the light of this Realisation.

I believe that the conflicts that we have tended to banish to our subconscious or unconscious can actually be resolved by Love. We don’t need to divide ourselves into acceptable parts and unacceptable parts in order to be ‘good people’. The days of ‘taboos’ are over… If we embrace this possibility whole-heartedly and let Love be the guide.

Love, as Freedom will bring about integration, resolving our conflicts – first of all our internal conflicts… then the ones we live out and the ones we see around us too.
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It is a good idea to also state that an intellectual analysis and concepts are not enough. They will not give the whole picture. There is an element of intuition in some of our choices which only make sense from a greater perspective than we have at the time we make the decision. So your choice of monogamy, your understanding of love, and even your reasons for defending it and for defence of your vision of love cannot necessarily be confined to intellectual analysis.

You – or I – may want to insist that our ways of doing things are better because they feel so totally ‘right’ to us. But the ‘rightness’ we feel may be because we are doing precisely what is most appropriate, most healing, most Life-affirming, most Love-affirming right now… and really it doesn’t do it justice to try to rationalise it too far, and it certainly doesn’t make sense to impose it on anyone else. What’s right for us now is because of who we are right now. It may not be right for us at any other moment in the future – let alone for anyone else.
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In relation to Love, I feel that the most valuable thing is to have a genuine experience – a Vision, a Blessing, a touch of Unconditional Love – and to then let that Light that has been ignited in our Heart be the guide for understanding.

Religions throughout the history of humanity have often tried, and often failed, to inspire this Blessing and to nurture the Light that it brings. Strange as it may seem, often the strong desire to preserve and to share truth has in itself led to the corruption, distortion and discrediting of truth. The whole point here is that Love can only be shared – not imposed, not controlled, not even shaped to our own needs. Love releases us from all our desires to impose, to control and at the deepest level, satisfies our needs by leading us to transcend the state in which they arise – thus the so-called ‘Miracle of Love’ and the extraordinary and supposedly impossible phenomena associated with ‘saints’. However, I am not placing ‘sainthood’ or transcendence as an ideal or goal here.

Integration can lead to transcendence, in ‘Divine’ timing – or Natural timing – call it what you will. But integration is surely more valuable than transcendence anyway. Transcendence is an experience… Integration is a whole re-defining of our being – or even an un-defining of our Being – making transcendence redundant.

Perhaps your monogamy is an ‘inspired asceticism’, an intuitive way for you to cultivate and honour Love – effortless because it is precisely the ‘right’ path for you right now. But there is a vast difference between ‘inspired’ or ‘intuitive’ asceticism and ‘forced’ or ‘morally-imposed’ asceticism.
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About the insecurity that people feel in their relationships and the necessity of re-affirming their egos. Yes, exactly... We are in agreement about the importance of a deep self-awareness so that ‘Freedom’ doesn’t become an excuse and justification for self-delusion and shallowness. In other words: Integrity is the key.

The Love that both, Íris and I, are describing, expressing – yes, even advocating – is a love that encompasses all manifestations of Life… So monogamy, polygamy, polyamory or whatever else people come up with can be expressions of Love – if there is integrity. If there is no integrity then they will all tend to be ways of compensating for insecurity.

It seems to me that you are advocating integrity above all. I feel that this is exactly what I am advocating too. Where we perhaps differ is in that you don’t seem to accept that (or at least understand how) anyone else’s experience could be so radically different from yours that they would make radically different choices and still make them with integrity, with Love. You seem to be saying that only someone who makes the same choices as you could possibly be expressing ‘real love’.

Of course I am guilty of doing the same in a way… You appear to be defining love as necessarily monogamous and regarding anything that deviates from that as being ‘not love’… and I am defining Love as Freedom and saying that anything that deviates from that is ‘not Love’… but I am not defining what form Freedom should take.

Love, as I understand it, is the Underlying Nature of Everything, it is all-powerful... but it is not manipulative. Love itself is perfectly capable of sustaining a monogamous relationship when that is what is most appropriate for the two people involved.

I realise that there is a danger that people will misinterpret my words and think that I am advocating ‘free love’ in a totally superficial way. If I criticise ‘monogamy’ at all, I am actually criticising the ‘institution’ of monogamy as a socially-enforced assumption that it is morally superior, or more effective at preserving or expressing Love.
I am not criticising the natural occurrence of monogamy. I am questioning whether there ought to be moral or social pressure enforcing it or not.


Do you feel that you have an understanding of the perspective that I am expressing now?
It felt as though you had perhaps adopted a 'contrary position' to me and to Íris, perhaps because you felt we were advocating a contrary way of living to that which you feel comfortable with, but ultimately, if we are all genuinely adopting a position of integrity there seems to be no fundamental divide between our perspectives.

Wishing you beautiful, magnificent, heart-melting, ‘rule-dissolving’ Love, in whatever form it appears.


Peter Littlejohn Cook