Introduction is:

the author’s direct engagement with the reader, setting the stage by explaining the book’s purpose, what the reader will gain (”What’s In It For Me?”), and why the author is the right guide, functioning as a compelling hook to build trust and excitement for the main content.

“Work is love made visible.”

Khalil Gibran

“Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune.

But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,

And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life,

And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.”

Love takes work.

I know, perhaps that is not the good news that you were hoping to read when you opened this.

Or perhaps, it is exactly the good news you were hoping to read, because a deep part of you knows that love takes work, but you have never quite known how to do the work of love.

That is the purpose of this book.

Work is deep magick. Work is action. But under capitalism, our notions of labour and work have been spoiled and connected to exploitation. The care work that is necessary for every human being to live and thrive, often relegated to women and actively taken up by queer folk, becomes disregarded, seen as less than, unimportant, and in many cases is rendered completely invisible. 

Women in particular are often exploited for the emotional and care labour that they do; labour that is fundamental to our species and without which we cannot survive. Humans are attachment oriented animals. We survive and thrive in community and we cannot live without each other. Capitalism entertains the lie that we can; that we live in a “dog eat dog” world, that only the select few can live at the top of the pyramid while feeding on and benefitting from the labour done by those at the bottom. This is something I would like to make explicit, conscious, and hopefully transform through this book.

Care work is work. Care work is labour. And love is labour. But labour doesn’t have to be… laborious. What if the work of loving others, of being in relationship with ourselves and with God, the Universe or the Cosmos (aka, the whole Self that we are a part of) and of learning to enact love is some of the most meaningful work that we get to do as humans? What if, in a crisis of loneliness and an epidemic of meaninglessness, where so many people are disconnected from meaningful labour while being exploited for their labour, the answer to all of our questions, and all of our hearts deepest longings is… love?

And that might seem silly or sappy to you. It might also seem like “duh.” But I am not speaking of the romantic love that we see in movies. I am not speaking of the stories of boy meets girl, girl falls in love, girl hops onto the back of the stead of the shining white knight and lives happily ever after.

The end.

I am not speaking about finding “the one” or the person who will “complete” you. I am not speaking of a love that is found in a singular romantic partner at all. This romantic fantasy, born out of deep loneliness and the longing to find more in love, marriage and devoted partnership, often creates more suffering than it does love. There is a difference between falling in love and being in love or enacting the work of love. This is a difference I hope to make explicit through this book.

In a loveless world, it is normal and natural for us to fantasise about the one. We are, after all, fed the romantic fantasy from the time we learn how to walk. The romantic fantasy is in the Disney movies, the fairytales, the books we read and the holidays our culture celebrates. It is also in our advertisements and marketing, and given that the average human sees around 10 000 advertisements a day, we are constantly, subliminally and unconsciously bombarded with messages that tell us that our one true love and the ultimate wholeness and completion we will feel when we meet them is just one… purchase, holiday, coffee shop visit or dating app away. They are just around the corner, as long as we stay alert and keep looking for them, while also not looking too hard lest we seem desperate. We are told to stay in this cycle of searching, searching, searching, until the one day where we miraculously find them.

And how do we know we’ve found them? Well, we feel the thing that all of the fairytales have told us to look out for. We feel… ‘the spark’. Maybe it’s in the twinkle in their eyes when we look at them. Maybe it’s in the throbbing in our heart, or our gut, or our pussy, when they say our name. Maybe “we just know” as the movies always remind us is a possibility. How often do we hear a sentiment like: “I met them, and I just knew they were the one”?

And maybe we find that for a few days, or weeks, or months this all feels true. We are wrapped up in the dopamine love fest of infatuation and new love. We are completely enamoured with our partner, thinking that they could do no wrong, that they are the one we have been searching for all of this time, and it just makes sense as to why things never worked out with the others. We tell ourselves these very romantic things until… we start to see their humanness.

We don’t like the way they talk with their mouth full at the dinner table. We hate how they embarrass us in front of our friends. We roll our eyes at the comments they make about our current cultural and political landscape. We start to feel the presence of much feared incompatibilities. And within that incompatibility, we feel grave disappointment. Where once we saw the face of an angel, glowing and perfect, we start to notice fine lines and wrinkles; signs of death and decay and fallibility. 

And then we think, after all our yearning and searching and eventual disappointment “this must, after all, not be the one”. They couldn’t possibly be the one if they don’t know who our favourite artist is, or if they don’t enjoy the music that we like, or if their idea of a good life is so radically different from our own. Where once there was a shimmering mirage, there is now a hot and cold desert; there are dusty tumbleweeds and an annoying cowboy with a piece of grass sticking out of their mouth that always says the wrong things and there is inconvenient weather and nights that are far too chilly and days that are scalding hot (and not in the good way). Is this the land of happily ever after? Is this why they don’t show you what comes after the ride into the sunset? There is nothing glamorous about a barren wasteland!

And the perhaps disappointing part is that it is in this dry, barren wasteland that the work of love starts. It is in this place that is too hot and too cold, but never just right, where we learn to do the most meaningful work of love. It is in the moment where we are violently bucked off the horse, when we are shocked and confused, when we realise that the knight taking off his helmet is not valiant and daring and kind all of the time but is mostly human; a human that farts, a human that says silly things, a human that hurts us, and a human that is completely and totally loveable. It is in the land of “after the ever after” that the work of love begins.

Now, this book isn’t a plea to go back to your shitty ex now that you know there is no one true love or happily ever after. This book isn’t a book to say “any relationship can work.” Rather, this book will (hopefully) give you the tools to discern which relationships you want to invest your time and energy in, while giving you the tools to navigate your disappointment when even a really good relationship will still have its ups and downs, and will in no way be perfect. This book is a book about romantic recovery, and learning to reclaim all of the energy that you have used being swept up in this fantasy so that you can channel it into something that is useful and generative for your one glorious life and our shared glorious world.

The work of love is about learning to navigate the desert of after ever after. The work is about learning to ask “what can grow in this oasis garden?” and to come to terms with the ecosystem that you are a part of. So often we try to make our garden of love into what we have seen in the movies. We want the same devotion, romantic gestures, unending sexual appetite and ever present infatuation and in loveness that we have seen modelled time and time again. We look at the garden we are tending to and we say “why can’t it look more like theirs?”. We compare our garden to the gardens of the aspirational couples we see on instagram and YouTube, the fictional couples of movies, books and our favourite fantasies, and those friends who have been together for years who seem to just “get it”. We think that being in love is some big cosmic secret that we have just not been let in on, that we are one course, or book, or therapist or podcast away from figuring it all out. And then we think “Oh poor me! Why me?! If I wasn’t so dysfunctional, if I wasn’t so traumatised, if I didn’t have daddy or mommy issues… I would have figured this all out. Something must just be wrong with ME.”

And this is what the romantic fantasy tells us. This fantasy tells us that everyone has a one true love and that you will find them in this lifetime and if you haven’t, you must just not have worked hard enough, OR you need to wait more and be more patient because you never know when you could bump into them. Or, if you’re into self-development, you just need to do more journaling, meditation, retreats or trainings in order to be worthy and to attract or “manifest” your one true love to you. This often leads to more shame and overworking than it does genuine love.

I will come out upfront and say that this book is for recovering romantic addicts who also are interested in magick - or some form of spirituality - that will allow them to find their one true love not in a singular person, but in their larger self. Some people call this your higher self. Some people call this your holy guardian angel. Some people call this the earth, the cosmos, the universe. Some people call this the mushroom Gods or the mycelial web. Some people call this the creator. Some people call this God. Some people call this consciousness. You can call it whatever you want. I’m not attached to the name or the language that you use, but I am attached to helping you connect to something infinitely larger than yourself and finding your one true love in that. Whether your entry point into believing in this larger consciousness is cosmic, spiritual, religious or ecological, I am not fussed.

Here is where things get tricky. I don’t believe that the romantic fantasy is inherently wrong or bad or even totally misguided. I believe that there is a kernel of truth within the romantic fantasy, and that kernel of truth is that we are all seeking wholeness and completion. This is what the great alchemists have spoken of for centuries and this notion is exemplified in the work of the alchemist Carl Jung. Carl Jung understood that all myth and all story is the story of union; the union of the conscious and the unconscious, or in mystical terms the union of the timeless dimension with the dimension of time, the union between the finite and the infinite. This, in alchemical and magickal terms, is often known as The Great Work, or the magnum opus, which includes complete spiritual transformation through the unification of all opposites. I believe that the romantic fantasy is another fairytale that is pointing us towards this deeper truth, and when we look at the fairytales of our childhood through this lens, not as fantasies of union with another human but as fantasies of union with our larger Self (which is the ultimate unification) we can find its redemption.

I do believe in the truth that every human has a one true love. I, however, believe that this one true love is our Self. Not our small, egoic, self-obsessed self, but our large, vast and infinitely mysterious Self. Throughout this book, I will use the language of your small self and your capital S Self. 

Your small self is you. This is what some people call your ego or your personality. It is what you generally on a day to day basis will refer to as yourself. Your large Self is also you. It is what some people call God, the Universe or the Cosmos. Your large Self is what you generally and habitually disassociate from and think of as “other” than you or “the world which exists outside of you”. In this book we will play with the idea that, in the words of Carolyn Lovewell, “you are not at all who you think you are.” My hope is that through reading this book, and receiving its magick, you will begin to think of yourself simultaneously as your small self and large Self, and you will come closer to the ultimate loving and alchemical union between the two.

Love is union.

Love is the force that weaves between all seemingly disconnected parts of the large Self. Love is the force that brings all of these seemingly disparate parts back into harmonious connection, and love creates connection where once there was the illusion of disconnection. Love creates awareness where we were previously unconscious. And love is perhaps the only force powerful enough to transform our world from one of chaos into one of harmony.

In order to understand Love we can look to the cosmos. When we look out at the vast cosmos, it is filled with stars, galaxies, burning suns and solar systems that we know not of. There is an infinite mystery that surrounds our universe and yet there is containment because there is but one universe. Even if we zoom out to the perspective of the multiverse there is still the paradox of oneness within the multiplicity. We do not know how big or vast this ‘oneness’ is or whether it does in fact contain one or multiple universes. But I still feel and sense that there is right containment; that if we zoom out big enough or far enough or vast enough we will find the shape and the name of this oneness.

Many people through the centuries have called this oneness God, the great creator, or the first ancestor from which all life emerged. From oneness came the many, and yet the many eternally belong and are part of this oneness. Love is the force that weaves in between these seemingly disparate parts who may have forgotten the original oneness. Yet, love always remembers. This makes love a force that exists in between spaces. Love is birthed through multiplicity, and love is remembrance of what came in the beginning and who and what we all are. If we allow it to, love will help us remember our Self.

Throughout this book we will be doing our own zooming in and out. We will be zooming out to the vast cosmic and spiritual landscape of love. In other words, to the realm of the infinite. We will also be zooming in to the human realm and the ways that love exists in between us, the seemingly disconnected manifestations of God who have forgotten our true face and our true Self. In other words, to the realm of the finite. We will be exploring both the macrocosm and microcosm and in the name of love, we will create harmony and understanding between the two. Like cosmic builders, we will construct a bridge that unites the realms.

In order to have better relationships and to do the work of love with our Self, with our lover/s, with our friends and family members and neighbours and strangers, which is oh so needed in this moment of human history, we must first heal from the delusion and fallacies of the romantic fantasy and the primacy that it has taken within our relational culture. We must wake up to the kernel of truth within the romantic fantasy. And, in magickal terms, we must sacrifice the romantic fantasy at the altar of True Love™.

The romantic fantasy has us invest in the joys and delights, the ups and downs, of being in love. This is also known as infatuation. But what is the difference between being in love, or falling in love, and experiencing true love? I believe that true love, the love that unites the cosmos and the love that unites humans, is about loving without attachment or condition. This is a very Buddhist concept, but whether we subscribe to Buddhism or not I believe that this has great relevance for our everyday lives. Many of us love through clinging. We associate love, and being in love, with possessing the subject of our desire. This feeling of being ‘in love’ ends up creating a great depth of anxiety within us as we grasp to own and control our beloved.

True love, when reclaimed from the romantic fantasy, is about being authentically loving both with ourselves and with the other, and finding the right distance and the right conditions through which we can express that love. True love does not look like being boundaryless, or letting things slide that don’t feel good for us because ‘it’s love’. True love looks like compassionate boundaries and exquisite self and other respect. True love surrenders attachment and possession at the altar of the truth; allowing both and all participants to dwell exquisitely and truthfully within a deep knowledge of what they want and need.

True love is something that feeds us and is often deeply generative. Sometimes I find that being ‘in love’ can feel the opposite. When we are not in the high of it, it can feel deeply extractive, draining and destabilising, much like an addiction that is running its course. While true love is boundaried, as we sense into where we end and another begins and bow to our differences with humility and acceptance (and often a healthy dose of disappointment) being ‘in love’ often involves a high degree of enmeshment. True love often asks: “what can I do for Love?” both in myself and in another. “What can I do to honour the currents of love that flow in between us?”

Being ‘in love’ often asks: “what can Love do for me?” and seeks only self-interested gain.

It may seem like I am creating a glamorized state of true love; that true love is some high ideal which we must strive to embody while disregarding our human needs and desires. This is not what I am saying. What I am saying is “can we let go of the cloying, needy attachment that makes us addicted to love?”.

When we are in love, and we separate, this often ends in heartbreak, and sometimes (more than you might think) anger, hatred and revenge. How could the words of “I love you” turn into words of violence and anger and rage so easily? I think it is because when we are “in love” we are often behaving more like addicts than lovers. Think: the devil and the lovers in the major arcana of the tarot. Both cards depict two beings entwined. In the lovers, they are unified in love under the guidance of their guardian angel. In the devil, they are united through chains of attachment. Every human relationship invites us to make a choice as to whether we embody the devil or the lovers - in loveness or true love - connection or cloying attachment. The attachment that I speak of is different from secure attachment, which we will unpack throughout this book, because there is in fact a difference between attachment as the Buddhists speak of it and attachment as attachment theorists speak of it.

When we are possessed by the archetypal devil, we are constantly looking for our next hit, ready for the sip of our lover that will momentarily satiate us. We may become like children, pouty and feeling neglected when our lover cannot give us the attention that we desire. We may sulk and throw hands and fists in the air when a lover is not capable of meeting a need. And then, when coupled with the romantic fantasy, we say: “if you loved me, you would!” as if love and capacity have anything to do with each other. When we are in love, we often become more like hurt children than responsible adults. We treat our lover like our parent who is responsible for taking care of us and meeting our every need, and rarely do we have healthy coping mechanisms for navigating the disappointment of trying to love - and be loved - by other fallible humans.

Being in love and possessed by the romantic fantasy, we tell ourselves that we should be the centre of our partner’s universe, that we should drop everything in our lives for our partners and they should do the same for us. This can be a comforting fantasy. Of course we want to feel special, chosen and centered; and, we will never, in truth, be the centre of someone else’s universe, nor is it particularly sane to make another human being the centre of ours.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with sulky, childlike petulance. I actually find it quite endearing when consciously engaged with. The challenge is when we become possessed by this spirit in an unconscious way and believe these internal experiences to be absolutely true. This belief in the paramount truth of our possession is quite different from the flavor and texture of the brief, fleeting and moving possessions that we can love, yes, approve of, yes, and ask for support and holding around, yes, all without making them someone else’s problem or fault.

At the end of the day, we are the centre of our universe. And to learn to be sane in love, to learn to centre ourselves, is to learn to be loving with another too. When we are the sun of our own solar system, we can find our orbiting planets; the moving parts that feel good to dance and engage with. Some planets will be farther from us. Some planets will be closer to us. Some planets will be more like comets or stars that come into our orbit for a short while before spinning out into the vast cosmos. All of these loves are beautiful, all of them are sacred, all of them are holy, whether they are friends, lovers, family members or another kind of entanglement. You are always the sun, in relationship with orbiting planets and in relationship with your greater universe always.

The romantic fantasy, broadly speaking, leads women to believe they need to be saved, and teaches men to be the ones who can do the saving. As women and people socialized as women, who this book is predominantly for, we learn and are conditioned to search for salvation outside of ourselves when it is waiting inside of ourselves. But no one can ever ‘save’ you from yourself. No one can ever save you from your dharma. No one can save you from your fate or your destiny. It is yours alone to live and walk. It is yours alone to face. But you can be supported and you can traverse through space-time with the love of others. This makes our human experience incredibly meaningful and far more rich. This book is a dedication to that traversing, and how we do so with as much love, grace, kindness, compassion and tenderness as possible.

May it liberate you to love.