What If Love Isn't About Trying Harder—It's About Seeing Differently?

We've all been there. Someone hurts us, and we're supposed to forgive. We're struggling, and we're told to be more loving. The world feels broken, and somehow we're supposed to respond with compassion instead of anger. The whole thing feels... exhausting. Like we're perpetually coming up short at something we should be naturally good at.

Maybe love isn't a performance. Maybe it's not something you muscle through with willpower and good intentions. What if love is actually how the universe works. Not as poetry. As physics.

The Problem With Matter-Based Love

We grow up thinking love is something we conjure up. We decide to love, we commit to loving, we white-knuckle our way through loving even when it's hard. It's all willpower, all the time. You love your difficult family member because you should. You show up for your friend because that's what good people do. You forgive because that's the mature, evolved thing.

And sure, that's not nothing. But it's exhausting. And it never quite works the way we want it to.

Here's why. When we're rooted in a matter-based worldview, we think love is something one separate person generates and sends to another separate person across the void. It's a transaction. You produce it, they receive it, hopefully they change accordingly. When that fails (and it often does), we blame ourselves for not loving hard enough.

But what if that's the whole problem.

The Shift: Love As Reality Itself

The spiritual perspective that Christian Science offers is wild when you actually let it in. It doesn't ask you to be more loving. It asks you to recognize that Love is the fundamental principle of existence. Not as something you do. As something you see.

Think about it this way. A musician doesn't create music by willing it into existence from nothing. They recognize the laws of harmony that already exist and align themselves with those laws. The music was always there—in the math, in the physics, in the nature of sound itself. The musician just removes the obstacles and lets it flow.

Love operates like that. It's not scarcity you have to manufacture. It's abundance you have to stop blocking.

When you stop viewing people as separate, broken, needing your judgment to fix them, something shifts. You start seeing them differently. Not as matter-based problems requiring matter-based solutions. But as expressions of divine truth, fundamentally whole even when their behavior suggests otherwise.

This isn't spiritual bypassing. It's not pretending bad behavior is okay. It's recognizing that the person and their problem aren't the same thing.

Your ex-partner who hurt you? Still loved. Your boss who doesn't respect you? Still loved. The political opponent you can't stand? Still loved. Not because you're stroking yourself for being magnanimous. But because love isn't conditional on behavior. It's the nature of existence.

Here's What Changes

When your foundation shifts from matter-based to spirit-based thinking, the practical effects are almost boring in their simplicity. You stop trying to be the salvation in someone else's life. You stop taking their choices personally. You stop thinking their failure is your fault and their success is your responsibility.

You also stop performing love and start being love. Which is easier. Way easier.

The Psalms in this week's lesson keep returning to this: your steadfast love, your faithfulness, the Lord's mercies that are new every morning. Not because God's love is contingent on your performance. But because it is the substance of existence. You couldn't separate from it if you tried.

One of the passages talks about trials turning us "like tired children to the arms of divine Love." Notice it doesn't say we earn that comfort. We turn to it. We recognize it. It's already there.

When you operate from this understanding, forgiveness stops being work. It becomes clarity. You see that what you need to forgive isn't real in the way you thought. The person's essence wasn't actually the wound they caused. Their fundamental nature is still intact, still whole, still loved.

That doesn't mean you stay in harmful situations. It means you respond from a different level. From seeing beyond the material circumstance to the deeper truth underneath.

The Freedom Part

Here's where it gets really good. Most religious traditions ask you to love while you're still rooted in a material worldview. It's cognitive dissonance at best, impossible at worst. You're supposed to love your neighbor while simultaneously believing they're a separate consciousness that can permanently damage you or deny you what you need.

The spiritual perspective dissolves the contradiction entirely. When you understand that Mind (capital M) is the only actual power, and everyone is an expression of that same infinite intelligence, love isn't harder. It's natural. It's like asking water to be wet.

And notice what this does to your life. You stop seeking love as validation. You stop needing someone else's affection to prove your worth. You stop defending yourself against potential hurt by keeping people at arm's length. You can actually be with people, vulnerable and real, without needing the outcome to be different than it is.

That's freedom. And it comes from a fundamental shift in how you see reality.

The Objection Everyone Has

"But that sounds naive. People are actually hurtful. They actually cause damage. Love alone won't fix that."

Right. And I'm not arguing that it will. What I'm saying is that the harm you're experiencing might not be what you think it is. A person rooted in ignorance about their true nature might do destructive things. But the destruction itself—the actual lasting damage—exists only in the material framework where separate minds can really hurt each other.

Spiritually, that framework isn't actually true.

I get that this sounds crazy. I'm not asking you to believe it on faith. I'm inviting you to observe your own life. Notice when you operate from material thinking (they hurt me, I'm damaged, I need to protect myself from them) and when you've operated from spiritual insight (they don't understand their own nature, this isn't really about me, I can respond differently). Notice what happens in each case.

Where To Start

You don't have to believe all this to explore it. Start with the question: What if the loving response isn't about being a better person, but about seeing more clearly? What if forgiveness isn't you being the bigger person but you seeing that the offense wasn't as big as it seemed?

Notice one situation this week where you're struggling with someone. Instead of asking "How can I be more loving?" ask "What would I see if I understood this person's true spiritual nature?" Not as a thought exercise. As a genuine inquiry.

You might be surprised what you find.