How to Love Without Clinging

From Tantra Is Not What You Think, by Daniel Sutton

To love without clinging, loosen your grip—not on the person, but on the need to control them or use them to feel okay. Like a kite that flies only when you let out line, love stays aloft on room, trust, and the freedom to let the other be a whole, separate person.

The grip that calls itself love

You send the message, and then you watch the phone. Delivered. Read. …typing. Stopped typing. And in that small silence your whole nervous system tightens around one person's next move, as if your okayness were a hostage they're holding without even knowing it. It takes other shapes too: a parent gripping harder at exactly the moment a child needs to be held looser; or jealousy—that clench that calls itself love and is its exact opposite.

Whatever the shape, the feeling is the same: the person you love has somehow become the thing you most fear losing, so you close your grip around them, certain that holding tighter is the same as loving more. It isn't. And here is the cruelty of it: the grip is the very thing that loses them. Hold a person too tightly and you don't get closer—you get the strain of someone being held against the pull of their own life, leaning quietly toward the door.

Love flies like a kite—on a little line

You've flown a kite, or watched someone do it. The thing that keeps a kite up is the one move that feels like letting it get away: you give it line. Let out more line and it climbs; clamp the line to your chest and refuse to give an inch, and it stalls and drops at your feet. The kite flies because you let it pull away from you.

Love is a great deal like that. It stays aloft on a little line—on room, on trust, on the willingness to let the other be a free and separate creature with a whole life of their own, rather than a fixture in yours. Loosening the line isn't loving less. It's the only thing that keeps love in the air.

The meeting of two open people

Tilopa, blunt as ever, pointed at the deepest version of this. The highest love, he suggested, isn't two needs locking together like puzzle pieces, each plugging the other's hole. It's closer to two open people meeting—two who have each, for a moment, set down the defended, grasping self, and so have nothing to protect and nothing to extract.

There's a phrase for it that lands almost like a koan: the meeting of two nothingnesses. It sounds cold, and it is the opposite of cold. When I am not clutching at you to complete me, and you are not clutching at me, what is left between us isn't a transaction—it's a warmth with no demand in it, the most spacious thing two humans can offer each other. Love stops being something I get from you and becomes something that happens, in the open space, exactly when neither of us is grabbing.

Letting go of the grip, not the person

Which is why the truest thing in love and the hardest thing in love turn out to be one and the same: letting go. Not letting go of the person—letting go of the grip on them. Loving them enough to let them be free: to change, to have a bad day that isn't about you, to need space, to grow in a direction you didn't plan.

Everything you love, you hold on loan. Grip it and you suffer the whole time and lose it anyway. Hold it loosely and you receive the only thing that was ever actually on offer: this, now, the warmth of them while they are here.

One honest, necessary line

Letting go is never a license to let yourself be harmed, and “loving them enough to let them be free” is never a reason to stay where you are being damaged. Sometimes the bravest letting-go in a whole life is letting go of a relationship that is hurting you—opening the grip and walking out the door. A love that asks you to abandon yourself isn't the loose, free thing this teaching means. That's just the grip again, wearing someone else's face.

A small practice: the silent good wish

Start easier than the people you're tangled up with—that's advanced. Pick someone mildly irritating, or a complete stranger in a checkout line, and, without saying a word or doing a single thing, silently wish them one real good thing: may you be okay; may today go easy on you. That's the whole practice. You want nothing back. They'll never know. Then carry on.

It's love with the grip surgically removed—a little warmth offered while you expect, ask, and receive precisely nothing. Done a few times, it quietly loosens the reflex to size up every person by what they can do for you, and rehearses, at a scale you can manage, the whole secret: the good stuff was never something you grab and keep. It was always something you give away into the open, and somehow still get to keep.