Have you ever found yourself in a good love relationship, yet feeling like something is missing? Have you gone from relationship to relationship looking for a certain fit, a certain depth of feeling, but never finding it? Well, you are not alone. For many years I found myself a member of that wandering group of restless lovers who never seemed satisfied with what they found. My wandering ways did not stop until I realized a simple but important truth: What I was looking for was not a particular person, but two different kinds of love.

My mistake was one that so many of us commit in our search for love. I was expecting my imperfect love relationship to fulfill a need it never could. Right or wrong, I expected my romantic love relationship to fill an emptiness in my life. I was searching for that one true love that would give me a sense of purpose, a feeling of being connected to the world in a positive, meaningful way. My romantic relationships had the good things most of us seek: being with someone who enjoys the same activities, having someone to hold when I was feeling down. My romantic partner gave me a feeling of being a complete person, something that I could never find being alone. And yet, there was that gnawing doubt in the back of my mind. The love I shared with my romantic partner did not seem 'spiritual' enough or deep enough. Eventually I got frustrated with the supposed shallowness of my current relationship, the inevitable break-up occurred, and I was off again in my grand quest for fulfillment.

While all of this was going on in my personal life, it all seemed unrelated to my day job as a philosophy professor. One advantage of being a philosophy professor is that I get to study some of the wisdom of other cultures and times. I was slow to realize that maybe some of the grand ideas I talked about in class might actually have usefulness in my personal life. One idea that I came across was that romantic love and spiritual love are very different and not to be confused with each other.