Liking

We are a people lavish with the word love and strangely careless with its meaning. We use it the way children use glitter—throwing it everywhere, assuming more is always better, rarely stopping to see where it actually lands. And then we wonder why so much of it stings.

Human love is loud. It announces itself. It wants witnesses. It shows up with promises and conditions tucked into its pockets like folded notes: I will love you if… I will stay as long as… We don’t say these things out loud, but the body knows them. The heart feels their weight.

Divine love—though we rarely name it as such—doesn’t behave this way. It does not bargain. It does not leave. It does not require us to be prettier, kinder, more successful, or less complicated than we are. It simply is. Steady as gravity. Present as breath. It doesn’t need proof because it isn’t fragile.

The trouble begins when we ask human love to behave like divine love. When we expect another flawed, breathing person to be infinite. When we believe that if love is “real,” it should never change, never end, never disappoint us. This is how suffering is born—not from love itself, but from misunderstanding its nature.

Human love ends. Even the most faithful version of it does. Sometimes it ends in anger, sometimes in silence, sometimes in the slow drifting apart that feels like watching a shoreline recede. And sometimes it ends in death, which is the most honest ending of all. None of this means it failed. It means it was human.

Divine love, by contrast, does not end. It does not belong to time. It does not grieve its own impermanence because it has none. It holds us when human love falls apart, when marriages crack, when friendships bruise, when the people we adored turn out to be terribly difficult to live with—which, if we’re honest, is most people.

Including ourselves.

This is where liking comes in, the underrated cousin of love. Liking is practical. It lives in the daily weather of relationship. You can love someone deeply and still dread their voice at breakfast, their way of avoiding conflict, their habit of never putting the keys where they belong. People will say, almost proudly, I love them, but I don’t like them, as if love alone should be enough to carry the whole weight.

It isn’t.

Liking requires attention. It asks us to notice what delights us about another person, even when love feels abstract or strained. It invites curiosity instead of judgment. It softens the sharp edges. When we work on liking each other—truly, actively—we make human love livable. We give it room to breathe.

And here is the quiet mercy: we do not need to manufacture divine love. We don’t need to cling to it or earn it or worry that it might disappear if we fail. It comes with the blessing of existence itself. Like sunlight, it does not ask whether we deserve it before warming our skin.

So perhaps the work is simpler than we think. Let divine love remain what it is—constant, unwavering, beyond our control. And let human love be human: tender, temporary, sometimes clumsy, sometimes breathtaking. Let us practice liking one another more, right here in the ordinary hours. The rest, the deeper love, is already holding us.

Hari Om Tat Sat