David Arinder
Nov 6 · 1 min read

Amanda, thank you for taking the time to respond. I appreciate the links to your other articles and read them with great interest. It’s clear to me you are a thoughtful person and you express your thinking well. In your “It’s Your Hangxiety, Stupid!” article, you mention two things.

I eventually learned that love is always worth it.

As long as we think that love comes from something outside ourselves — even from God — we are going to experience pain.

Could you say more about this? I’m especially interested in what you mean by “love”? (I say I love my child. I also say I love hotdogs. I mean completely different things). The reason I’m interested is because of the second part of your statement — it’s always worth it. What you mean by this. Do you mean that love benefits us always, or something else entirely? If so, how does it benefit us? How exactly is it “worth it?”

I am puzzled by your second statement regarding the source of love. It sounds as if you are saying, if we understand love to come from somewhere outside of ourselves, we will experience pain. Does that mean that if we finally come to the place where we understand ourselves to be the original source of love, we will then not experience pain? That seems to be difficult to reconcile with the reality of daily experience. If you have the margin, please help me understand your thoughts more clearly.

Again, thank you for engaging.