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I had four romantic relationships in college, and even though they were highly transformative, they all ended in breakup.

We broke up because I outsourced love to other people. It’s not just me. Most elite college freshmen mistake relative love—the emotions you feel or actions you take for a partner—for Absolute Love.

This has created three major problems

Firstly, it puts responsibility on our romantic relationships to be our primary caregivers.

We expect our partner to be our therapist, life coach, study procrastinator, and spiritual anchor simultaneously. Of course, great partners should be able to do some of this. But primary caregiving responsibility should be on us because it's our relationship to ourselves that grounds every challenge in the partnership.

Secondly, it puts insane expectations on our romantic relationships (family and friendships too).

Using relative love to replace Absolute Love is like filling a sifter with sand. Often, this is what breaks relationships, not bad communication, cheating, etc. Those are surface issues created by the unconscious disappointment of our partner not being able to fulfill us Absolutely. Only when relative love is put in its place can we love our romantic relationships without need.

The third issue this mismatch creates, is we cut ourselves off from Absolute Love.

This is the real tragedy. Gen Z is a bowl of anxiety, depression, and nihilism. Walking around Cornell campus every morning, I see students, headphones in, heads bowed, shoulders slumped. Coffee clutched like life support. Faces lit more by phone screens than sunlight. Conversations reduced to deadlines, deliverables, and how tired everyone is. Many talk of their studies or clubs like they're being forced to take out the trash. Without Absolute Love, reality is disenchanted, dead, a separate physical world as confused as we are about what we are doing in it and why.

To truly love our romantic relationships, ourselves, and the world at large, we must reclaim Absolute Love

Love for Spirit, the groundless ground which encapsulates all of reality into One, and imagines everything in consciousness. A love not only for how it creates and unifies, but how it destroys and separates. A love of reality as us, not separate.

It was only after my fourth breakup I was able to ask myself this question: What if college is simply a journey of deepening our ability to Absolutely love? That would be something wouldn’t it?

Absolute Love will help you:

• Grow romantic relationships (family and friendships too) with much less conflict while boosting their intimacy
• Deepen your joy and peace in your classes even when studying gets hard
• Build your connection with your clubs and hobbies

Most importantly, Absolute Love will deepen your ability to love yourself, as everything. This article will be deeply philosophical and practical. We’ll start by exploring what Absolute Love is, then what stops us from realizing it, and finally how to navigate your romantic relationships with Absolute Love in mind.

What Is Absolute Love?

Entertain me for a moment and let’s explore Absolute Love with an analogy from the only thing Gen Z universally loves: Minecraft.

Imagine there was a huge diamond ore, made out of many individual blocks of stone and diamond ore. Relative love is mistaking only the parts of the block made out of actual diamond ore as love. Absolute Love is realizing the whole big diamond block, all the stone, all the diamond ore, and the emergent properties of the whole—it’s all love.

Relative love is love rooted in relative perspective, valuation, prioritization. For example:

• Emotion for a romantic partner
• Helping a friend with their homework
• Feeding yourself so you don’t die

Absolute Love is all of that, and more. It’s a deep metaphysical acceptance of what is, as it is, as non-separate from you. It's a loving of one's self, one's tribe, one's country, one's world, and ultimately all that exists.

The best way to describe Absolute Love is a dissolving of self and other.

In order to navigate college, we create distinctions between self and other. Usually, students attribute their body and mind as well as the clubs, movements, and other things they like to their self. Everything else, including matter, Spirit, and especially everything they dislike is other.

Here's the thing: All self other distinctions are imaginary.

I don't mean they don't have logical coherence, consistency, or practical value. I mean there is no external substance forcing you to label some things as "self" and some things as "other".

Absolute Love is what you get when you take this insight to the maximum level. You dissolve all your self and other distinctions until you are everything, Spirit, the groundless ground which encapsulates all of reality into One, and imagines everything in consciousness. Absolute Love means loving Spirit in the four ways it shows up:

• Creative Spirit
• Unitive Spirit
• Separative Spirit
• Destructive Spirit

Love for Creative Spirit is love for all the ways Spirit creates form in Consciousness like colors, shapes, textures, the body of your partner, and the incredible jokes I weave throughout this article to make your tummy rumble.

Unitive Spirit is love for the ways Spirit unites to form holistic forms like an ant colony, a college campus, or a video game such as Expedition 33 (play it, it's incredible).

Separative Spirit is love for the ways Spirit separates like the separation between self and other, the different parts of your college major, and individual pages of The Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson making up the whole.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is Destructive Spirit, love for all the ways Spirit destroys forms

Destructive Spirit takes form in things like rape, 9/11, cancer, the animal farming industry, a coyote killing a house cat, or cheating on a partner.

These are all terrible things. I'm not condoning them on a relative human level. But this is exactly the problem. When viewed through relative love, these things should be shunned to the nether realm.

Absolute Love has no boundaries. It has no biases. It has no shunning. It simply is.

Most students find it easy to love Creative, Unitive, or Separative Spirit. When it comes to Destructive Spirit, however, it's a different matter. This is the main thing blocking us from Absolute Love. As soon as we label something evil and separate from us, we cut ourselves from that thing, from the whole diamond block. Loving is a dissolving of separation. And no student wants to connect themselves to rape, 9/11, or cheating.

I don't blame you. It takes tremendous courage to tie yourself to Destructive Spirit. I haven't fully done it. And yet ultimately, that is your true nature. The differences between you and Destructive Spirit are imaginary.

Do you think the Universe actually cares about the animal farming industry, climate change, or a coyote killing a house cat?

No. It makes absolutely no difference to it because to make a difference there must be a relative perspective to hold an evaluation.

You might still have some skepticism which is entirely fair. Which brings us to...

Three Common Traps Of Absolute Love

In the many conversations I've had with students about Absolute Love, three common traps arise. All three of these traps come from the Absolute Love Inflation Trap. This is when you hold Absolute Love so highly you reject relative love. Absolute Love doesn't reject relative love, it includes it. That's what it means to love Absolutely.

Let's see how that plays out in all three.

Trap 1: If Absolute Love implies loving everything, including evil, why shouldn't I do evil?

It's true. Absolute Love means there's no difference between Good and Evil. They just are. But that doesn't mean there aren't differences in relative love.

If Absolute Love leads you to begin acting in all the ways we relatively call evil, I would hesitate to say you are loving Absolutely. What you'll find is the more you dissolve the separation between self and other, and realize everything is simply you, the more kind, compassionate, and grateful you'll inevitably be.

Would you consciously do violence, belittle, assault, harass, lie, or horribly discriminate against yourself? No. Then why would you do it to others if they are you.

Trap 2: Doesn't Absolute Love imply equally loving everything then?

Technically, it does, at an Absolute level. But again, this is making the Absolute Love Inflation Trap.

If you stopped relatively loving at all, you would treat a stranger the same as your family, you would see watching television the same as studying, and you would die. There would be no reason to sustain your self by eating or drinking.

The art is in relatively loving with a root in Absolute Love. Love your partner as you. Love studying as you. Love the cheater, as you.

Trap 3: If I love everything Absolutely, why would I do anything? Doing nothing has the same value as doing something.

Absolutely everything is perfect as it is. Any bad/good evaluation you make is from relative love. But one last time, this is making the Absolute Love Inflation Trap.

The insight is in acting from relative love, rooted in Absolute Love—reality is perfect as it is. You can continue to act to make the world a better place relatively. But you don't make the mistake of believing there is some perfect state to get to, or that you will be permanently fulfilled through your actions. Only Absolute Love can permanently fulfill you.

Now that we've navigated these three traps, the question becomes, what made these traps arise in the first place? What keeps us from Absolute Love?

What Keeps Us From Absolute Love?

Selfishness.

It's really that simple. As stated earlier, to navigate college we create distinctions between self and other. Usually, students attribute their body and mind as well as the clubs, movements, and other things they like to their self. Everything else, including matter, Spirit, and especially everything they dislike is other.

But ultimately this separation is imaginary.

This is the cardinal wisdom truth Spiritual and Religious traditions have been trying to help humanity realize for millennia.

And I don't judge you, or me, for doing this at all. It's incredible for our survival. Not just survival in a physical sense, but a psychological one as well.

Here's three examples of psychological self-survival:

• Surviving your achievement relationship by continually doing work around friends or romantic relationship
• Surviving procrastination identity by watching shorts or films with friends or romantic relationship
• Surviving comparison by continually comparing yourself to other students

If you changed the above, you would have to die, psychologically. And of course the self doesn't want to die.

So instead we navigate college by slowly building shadows we don't even know are there. Shadows that can come as fear, imposter syndrome, perfectionism, but also on the other end toxic life purpose, self-improvement obsession, or dogmatic scientific beliefs.

When we hear about something like Absolute Love, the self—chock full of shadows—scoffs at the notion. This isn't practical! How the heck is this actually going to improve my romantic relationships?! All questions of relative love.

Like tectonic plates dividing two land masses, our shadows keep us from bridging the self other divide because we're far too attached. And ultimately, this keeps us from realizing Absolute Love.

What a shame.

I have another article on doing Spiritual Journaling to navigate shadows which you can read here. But that's outside of this articles scope. Now, let's get practical. This is the meat. What can Absolute Love tell us about building incredible romantic relationships?

How Absolute Love Can Help You Build Incredible Romantic Relationships (Or Any Relationship)

Absolute Love isn't just some philosophical inquiry done with a bottle of scotch and bath robe at 3:00 a.m. It has deep, practical, implications for how we can love. These are the five insights I wish I had during my four relationships in college. Perhaps one of them wouldn't have ended in breakup had I known.

Here are five of the most powerful.

Insight 1: Absolute Love Means Entering A Metaphysical Relationship With Your Partner

Imagine you were a painter with a set of colors. My colors would be green and blue. Your partner has their own colors, perhaps purple and red.

Absolute Love shows us love isn't just an emotion or action. Its connecting your colors with your partners, and painting something together.

When you deeply love someone, you let them change your relationship to the entire world. You each paint with different colors, altering your shared painting, influencing what you want to paint next, and so on. In this way, your partnership becomes a metaphysical relationship to reality, not just a relationship with a person.

It doesn't get more beautiful than that...

Insight 2: Become Your Own Primary Caregiver

Most of us enter romantic relationships in college unconsciously starving. Starving for safety, for reassurance, for regulation, for someone to tell us we’re okay. And when you’re starving, you don’t ask politely—you grab.

Becoming your own primary caregiver doesn’t mean becoming emotionally independent, stoic, or cold. It means you stop asking your partner to do the one job they can never actually do: hold your entire emotional universe together.

Absolute Love reveals something uncomfortable but liberating—no one else can love you Absolutely for you. Your partner can co-regulate, reflect, support, and walk with you. But they cannot be the ground of your being. When we ask them to be, they suffocate under the weight.

Insight 3: Accept Your Partner As They Are, Not Who You Want Them To Be

Relative love loves conditionally. Absolute Love loves truthfully.

Most relationship suffering comes from a subtle bait-and-switch: "I love you… and I need you to be different for that love to feel complete.”

We say we love our partners, but what we often love is a projected future version of them—more communicative, more ambitious, more healed, more aligned with our fears. And when they fail to become that imaginary person, resentment grows quietly in the background like mold.

Absolute Love doesn’t mean approving of everything your partner does. It means seeing them clearly before trying to change them.

When you accept someone as they are, two things happen:

1. You stop manipulating them through disappointment
2. Any growth that does occur is real, not coerced

Ironically, people change more when they’re fully seen than when they’re subtly managed. If you can’t accept your partner as they are now, the relationship is already conditional. And conditional love always collapses under pressure.

Insight 4: Understand And Love How You And Your Partner Have Acted From Selfishness

Every relationship contains moments of selfishness, fear, ignorance, unconsciousness, and lack of love. That’s not a failure of the relationship—it’s a feature of being human. Most people can see others selfishness quite well, but struggle when it comes to their own.

Relative love moralizes others moments of selfishness. Absolute Love contextualizes them by not asking: “How could you do that to me?” Instead it asks: “What pain, fear, or unmet need is trying to survive here?”

This doesn’t excuse harmful behavior. It appreciates that all harmful behavior has an internal root because we wouldn't see it as harmful unless with some relative evaluation. Not only does this help us explore if we might be the problem, but it builds our compassion and empathy for our partner's harmful action.

Insight 5: Love Everything As You

This is the deepest—and hardest—insight.

Absolute Love ultimately asks you to love not just your partner, not just yourself, but the entire relationship field as you. The joy. The boredom. The arguments. The endings.

Including the breakup.

When a relationship ends, relative love says: “This shouldn’t have happened.” Absolute Love says: “This too belongs.”

You don’t need to romanticize loss. You don’t need to bypass grief. But you also don’t need to exile parts of your life from love.

Every relationship you have in college is shaping your capacity to love more deeply, more honestly, more spaciously. Nothing is wasted—not the tenderness, not the pain, not the endings. When you stop trying to extract Absolute fulfillment from relative forms, relationships become what they were always meant to be: Sacred training grounds.

And maybe—just maybe—college will stop being about finding the person who completes you. It will become learning how to love reality deeply enough that no relationship has to carry that impossible burden ever again.

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