Expressing Your Love – vol. 8

This post looks at Rainer Maria Rilke’s Thoughts on Love. I love the power of the opening lines of this wedding reading. Love is not easy – it’s not easy to open one’s heart, it’s not easy to choose your spouse every day. But it is a gift that has been entrusted to all of us. I also love that this reading talks about the idea of not losing yourself in each other. It’s important in a loving relationship to keep your identity, hopes, and dreams. Yet at the same time, your commitment is that you will honor, respect, and love your spouse’s identity, hopes, and dreams. Happy planning!

For one human being to love another human being;
that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us,
the ultimate task, the final test and proof,
The work for which all other work is merely preparation.
Loving does not at first mean
merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person.
It is a high inducement for the individual to ripen,
to become something in himself,
to become world in himself for the sake of another person;
it is a great, demanding claim on him,
something that choose him and calls him to vast distance…
Once the realization is accepted
that even between the closest people 
infinite distances exist,
a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them,
if they succeed in loving the expanse between them,
which gives them the possibility of seeing each other
as a whole and before an immense sky.