Dipping into Adoration
A writer's notes on a scary emotion
As a writer, certain emotions fascinate me. The one I am preoccupied with at the moment is adoration.
This friend of mine—I call him Lover Boy—this is his secret vibration. On the surface, he’s judgy as hell. I mean, he’s harsh. He’s a bit formal, a guy who wears suits and whose face has a permanent expression of cool skepticism. But every once in a while, it all drops away.
One day we were walking down the street, and this car drifted out of an alley in front of us. We saw that the driver wasn’t paying attention at all. She was bent over the passenger seat while the car was drifting into traffic. Just a step closer and we saw that she was leaning over her son, maybe two years old. She cupped his cheek in her hand and—this was in Italy—said in this gorgeous voice just how incredible he was and how much she adored him.
I was deeply struck by the scene, that a mother should be so overcome with adoration as to launch her and her son blindly into traffic. (Mary…take the wheel.)
But the scene also affected Lover Boy. He watched it with the same awe and appreciation, and just for a moment, all of his judgment slipped away and he was utterly absorbed in the beauty of that love.
It’s Definitely on the Spectrum
Adoration is more than regular love. The term suggests intense devotion, but I like to take it out of the religious context. Think of that person you can’t stay angry at, no matter what they do. Even if they piss you off, you come back to love. That is a type of adoration.
It can be a parental love. As a parent, you’re always walking a line between giving this unconditional love, which can feel very natural and even instinctive, and needing to teach your children how to behave, largely for their own sake, so that they can become functioning members of society.
On the one end, you have these really tight-assed parents, the ones who are never going to love you unless you become a doctor. On the other end, you have the serial killer mom, the only person on Earth who will stand up and say “My son would never do that.” That is also adoration.
In those rare moments when Lover Boy’s harsh exterior falters, he slips into a kind of shocking hyperbole. He once told me, in all seriousness, that I had more grace than the Virgin Mary, and I could only stare in stupefaction (I mean, this man knows me) and wonder where all the criticism went.
These moments are so surprising that they earned him the nickname—snarky at first, but now I’m not so sure.
It took me over a year to realize that seeing that scene with Lover Boy wasn’t an accident. I believe something inside him called it forth from the world, a message or sign, pointing him to something latent in himself. As I got to know him better, I came to realize that beneath that exterior, there really is a man who is searching for a specific kind of love—because it’s the kind of love he strives to give.
But all of that judgment just keeps getting in the way. “It is,” he says, “impossible to look away from the brutal truth of the world.”
The Challenge
Most of the time, let’s be honest, adoring someone can seem like a weakness. It sets you up for allowing someone to take advantage of your kindness or affection, because no matter what they do, there will never be any punishment.
An interesting feature of this vibration is that people often have a problem with it. They’ll chide you (“You shouldn’t let him do that to you”). It can invite a dislike of the object of your adoration. At best, people will say you have a “blind spot,” at worst, that you need an intervention.
I once dated a man in Italy, I’ll call him G, who, within a very short period of time, I came to adore. To this day, I still don’t fully understand why, but he could do no wrong. He slept with other women—I adored him. He said he’d show up at a certain time and didn’t—I adored him. He got back together with his wife, for the sake of his kids—I still adored him. Nobody liked this guy. All of my friends and family thought he was Satan, but I had gone full Italian mother and just adored him. And he adored me right back. It didn’t change his behavior, but more to the point, none of his behavior changed our feelings.
The Hidden Fortress
It sounds flowery to adore someone, but it’s a practice with some very hard edges. Just think of all the things you’d rather not love.
Finding your way back to love after a disappointment or a heartbreak—or hell, even loving your kids on a regular day—takes fortitude. It means having an implacable inner fortress of safety and self-love, that no one else’s behavior can ruin. There’s a reason adoration is associated with the sacred. To be able to love like that requires a seemingly holy grace, because having that fortress takes strength and inner work.
A baby in its first moments of life, doing nothing but screaming and gulping in air, receives that love instantly from an awe-struck mother—and somehow that is true and right. We all deserve that love, every last one of us, and we know this but have spent our lives forgetting. So when someone gives us that love now, as adults, it strikes a very deep chord in our beings about our fundamental worthiness.
It also freaks us out.
I think, deep down, it strikes a chord about the nature of the universe, about something we may secretly wish to be true but, on a normal day, can scarcely believe—that the universe is made of love, and that its love is abundant, so abundant that it can love every single one of us for no reason at all.
And we, in turn, can love someone else for no reason at all.
Talk about flowery! How could this be true? Think of all the things that could go spectacularly wrong. Lover Boy thinks of these things all the time, and guards against them with a solid wall of judgment.
But I do notice that whenever we talk about that scene, he grows quiet. I watch, curious to see how the memory will change in his heart over time. Mostly, I wait for him to say the obvious—“that woman almost killed her son”—but he never has.