All You Need Is (Platonic) Love
Every serious discussion on the subject of love is bound to start from Plato’s Symposium. I’ll do no different, other than taking a character seriously who is otherwise often dismissed as “satirical” or a “comical relief” by scholars.
The Aristophanes Theory: Love as Searching for Your Other Half
In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes presents us with perhaps the most enduring and poetic theory of love ever conceived. In his mythical account, he tells us that humans were originally spherical beings with four arms, four legs, and two faces. These powerful creatures were three in number, male, female, and androgynous descended respectively from the sun, earth, and moon. When they attempted to scale the heavens and challenge the Gods, Zeus decided to humble them by splitting each being in half.
This divine punishment condemned humanity to an eternal search for their missing half. Aristophanes explains that "love is born into every human being: it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature". What we call love, then, is nothing more than this "pursuit for wholeness", this desperate attempt to reunite with our other half and become complete once again.
The brilliance of Aristophanes' myth lies not in its literal truth which the scholars try to find, but in its psychological accuracy. When we fall in love, we do indeed feel we have found something essential that was missing from ourselves. The beloved appears to complete us, to make us whole in ways we never imagined possible. This is why lovers often speak of feeling "complete" when they find their partner.
Yet there lies one crucial thing that mainstream romantic culture consistently misses: you are not supposed to ever find your other half and happily settle after. The beauty of love lies precisely in its incompleteness, in the eternal search rather than the final discovery.
The False Utopia of Romantic Love
I have no relationship advice to give and can’t imagine that long term romance really exists. True love certainly does but there’s a reason all great love stories end in death; where they don’t, and continue, that becomes material for comedy. I want death anyway.
- Bronze Age Pervert
In contrast, mainstream discourse is dominated by romantic love, a 19th century enlightenment rationalist invention. Earlier, marrying for love was more of an exception and less of a norm. This modern conception, constantly hammered into the minds of the masses through popular culture, espouses that someday you'll marry the love of your life and achieve lasting happiness through this union.
But this is a false utopia, built on fundamentally flawed premises. I can do no better than to quote Oscar Wilde who said, "A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her". Marriage for love, as a cultural institution, is indeed a stupid idea when viewed through the lens of what love actually is: an eternal, restless search rather than a settled condition.
However, that does not mean that one should shy away from embracing romantic love. But one must approach it with the caution that it will not last forever. To quote, again, Oscar Wilde: "Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever".
The Beauty of Incompleteness: Majnu and Laila
The story of Majnu and Laila illuminates this principle perfectly. Osho observes:
"Majnu was very fortunate; he didn't get Laila. They were truly fortunate—not meeting each other. He kept calling, crying, yearning. The drums from afar always sound sweet. It is in the distance that all charm lies. The closer you get to things, the more their futility begins to reveal itself."
When a sympathetic king offered Majnu any of the most beautiful women from his royal family, having seen the "very plain, homely, very ordinary" Laila himself, he couldn't understand the young man's obsession. But the King missed the point entirely.
"Such poetry, such songs are born in the hearts of poets who have suffered, who have yearned and never received their beloved. If they were to get that beloved, suddenly their eyes would open. Because what you had thought was your imagination. It was your projection. You had imposed it. What Majnu sees in Laila is not in Laila; it is in Majnu's own eyes. It is through Majnu's eyes that Laila is imagined."
The point which the King misses is that when we love someone, we elevate them to the level of a God or Goddess. They exist as a flawless creature in our imaginations. Laila, the one which existed in the world and the one that existed in Majnu’s projection are two different beings. Majnu misses a completely different point: upon being more exposed to our beloved over time, we discover the fatal realisation that they have their own fair share of flaws too. They are mortals like us, fighting their demons. Thus, the pursuit of modern never-ending romantic love reduces such a potent emotion into just another wasteful human indulgence.
But what if we used love differently? What if we used it as a potent force to reach God?
When Love Transcends the Human
How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?
- Oscar Wilde
The story of Dante and Beatrice provides us with a perfect example of how earthly love can become a pathway to the divine. According to tradition, Dante met Beatrice only twice in his life. First when they were children, then nine years later when she greeted him on the street, after which he "ran away without saying a word." That was essentially the extent of their earthly interaction.
Beatrice married another man and died at twenty-four. Yet she served as an inspiration to Dante for the rest of his life. This is most apparent in the Divine Comedy, where Beatrice leads the pilgrim into heaven, her character serving as a metaphor for divine love and spiritual guidance.
Throughout his journey in the book, Dante is propelled forward by his longing to see Beatrice. This longing is the very engine of his pilgrimage through the realms of the afterlife. At the outset, Dante the pilgrim is told by Virgil that he must descend into the cold darkness of the Inferno, not as an end in itself, but as a necessary journey to ascend and ultimately behold Beatrice. The hope of reunion with Beatrice is what gives Dante the strength to endure the horrors of hell and the trials of purgatory. As he climbs the arduous slopes of Mount Purgatory, it is the anticipation of meeting Beatrice at the summit that keeps him moving forward. Again and again, it is the desire to see Beatrice that motivates Dante to continue his journey when it seems most difficult.
Dante's love for Beatrice was distinctively chivalric in character: "morally elevating, passionate, disciplined, and transcendent." By the end of the Divine Comedy, "Dante's love for Beatrice transcends mortal or courtly love, evolving into a divine and transcendent form. Beatrice becomes a symbol of salvation and divine guidance". The crucial point is that their lack of contact created this symbolic power. Had they lived as husband and wife, arguing over who will do the dishes tonight, she could never have served as his guide through Paradise.
This theme of transforming earthly love into spiritual aspiration finds a powerful parallel in the Indian tradition. According to legends, Kalidasa, one of India’s greatest poets and playwrights, began life as a simple and uneducated man. He got somehow married to a brilliant Princess Vidyottama who mistakenly thought that he could even surpass her in knowledge. But after the wedding, the truth emerged: Kalidasa was illiterate and incapable of intellectual discourse. Furious and humiliated, Vidyottama rejected him, mocking his ignorance and, in some versions, banishing him from her presence until he had gained true knowledge.
Heartbroken and ashamed, Kalidasa turned to the divine for solace. Seeking the goddess Kali, he prayed fervently for wisdom and redemption. Moved by his sincerity, Kali bestowed upon him a divine blessing: granting him extraordinary intellect, eloquence, and poetic genius. The once-ignorant man was transformed into a scholar and poet of unparalleled talent, forever known as "Kalidasa," the servant of Kali.
Kalidasa’s story beautifully illustrates how the pain of unfulfilled longing can ignite a profound spiritual awakening. The love and validation he sought from Vidyottama, denied and withdrawn, became the very fuel that propelled him toward divine grace.
Similarly, Meera's love for Krishna represents another supreme example of how romantic longing transforms into divine devotion. Born into a Rajput royal family in 1498, Meera developed an intense love for Lord Krishna from childhood. In her case, she was spared the tragedy of union with one’s beloved, as happens with us less fortunate ones. This distance, this impossibility of earthly union, allowed her love to transform into something transcendent.
The True Purpose of Love
The intelligent person is bound to stumble upon the fact sooner or later that no relationship can satisfy. Why? — because every relationship is only an arrow towards the ultimate relationship; it is a milestone, it is not a goal. Every love affair is just an indication of a bigger love affair ahead — just a little taste, but that little taste is not going to quench your thirst or satisfy your hunger. On the contrary, that little taste will make you more thirsty, will make you more hungry. That’s what happens in every relationship. Rather than giving you contentment, it gives you a tremendous discontentment. Each relationship fails in this world — and it is good that it fails; it would have been a curse if it was not so. It is a blessing that it fails. Because each relationship fails, that’s why you start searching for the ultimate relationship with God, with existence, with the cosmos.
- Osho
What emerges from these examples is a profound truth about the nature of love that our culture has forgotten. Love, in its highest form, is not meant to be satisfied through human relationships but rather used as a force to reach the divine.
In the Platonic understanding, love begins with physical attraction but "transcends gradually to love for Supreme Beauty." This concept of Divine Eros became what we call platonic love. "With genuine platonic love, the beautiful or lovely other person inspires the mind and the soul and directs one's attention to spiritual things."
The examples of Majnu and Laila, Dante and Beatrice, and Meera and Krishna all demonstrate the same principle: love reaches its highest expression not through possession and consummation, but through eternal longing that points beyond the human toward the divine. The distance, the impossibility, the incompleteness, these are not obstacles to love but rather its very essence.
All you need is love, indeed. But not the kind that settles into domestic comfort. The kind that burns with eternal longing, that transforms the lover into a seeker of the divine, that uses the human beloved as a stepping stone toward God. This is platonic love in its truest sense, not the absence of passion, but passion purified and directed toward its ultimate object: the Divine Beloved who alone can satisfy the soul's infinite hunger for love.
Very well written.