“To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.”
-Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
It shouldn’t be that way. There could be longing but I wouldn’t call that suffering at least compared to a broken heart. Can we speak of love when it goes in only one direction? You can say “I love her” or “she loves me” but unless it is reciprocated, I don’t know if you can say there’s love.
Hmm. The English word “love” is used in so many contexts that it’s jumbled into a composite that loses clear meaning. Aquinas understood pure love as “to will the good of another” – as other, with no consideration of reciprocation.
That seems impossible for nearly all of us fallen humans, but saints and mystics believe it, like Aquinas, who, according to legend lay down his pen before he finished his greatest work because once he understood pure love, all that he had written was to him then “as straw” (hay fed to livestock).
Personally, I do believe we’re capable of coming pretty close to divine love, but it’s probably the hardest thing in human experience. Yet, anything worth doing is hard. It comes from very deep inside, and none of us go deep inside willingly. We have to be dragged there. It’s where the truest “inner work“ is done.
And it is not done BY us. It is done TO to us, by that relentless Lover.
Those are lame words I use to describe what happened to me during months of clinical depression. Moaning and immobilized, I was certain it would not be me who rescued myself. I cannot say honestly that I thought these things, or even felt these things. But it was a deep kind of knowing.
The excruciation was easily understood as “suffering” – where I understood what ‘hopeless’ and ‘powerless’ really mean. It would have been impossible to reciprocate the love the Lover dripped onto me to lift me when the work was done.
I think that’s probably the best way I can tell the story of when I began to understand that true love isn’t fantasy.
I haven’t read Dostoevsky. Yet. But that’s my own note from under the ground of being.
Neil D. 2026-09-13
Surely you can comment on depression, true love, suffering, etc.?
Feel with Neil 
Using a Dostoevsky quote is a diabolical idea to support love as being divine and positive because all he writes about IS suffering…no, you can have love without suffering. Your points bring up different tangents, for example, love can’t be love without suffering; love can’t be love without reciprocity; love can’t be love without it being “divine”-whatever that means…etc… love can be simple without being so complex. That’s where I define love; it happens when you don’t even think about it…I said it once without thinking about it and that is “divine”… I love my pets and I never thought THAT was possible. Idk… I think I am missing your point.
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