What is object love? It means having the capacity to perceive and like another person for being themselves. Now, I have defined personal love in a similar way, but personal love is not as complete as object love. It is insufficiently developed because it is still dependent on seeing a person as only good and perfect in order for you to love them. Let’s say you meet someone and fall in love. You feel, “I really love you; you are wonderful.” A few days later, or a few weeks or months later, you realize that your beloved has little things here and there you don't like, and right away you don't love her anymore. “Bye-bye, see you later”—and you go off to find somebody who is perfect. So, a person can experience love, can experience the pink, but only because he has a condition in his mind that allows it—the belief that the other person is perfect enough for you.

The first central feature is the fact that we have many objects of love—we don’t only love one thing. It would be very difficult to find a human being who only loves one thing, and generally our love is for many different people, things, and activities.The other main characteristic of love is that the objects of our love are always changing; it’s rare that our objects of love stay the same. It’s easy to see this by looking at how they have changed since childhood—we’ve loved so many people since then, one person after another, and we’ve loved a succession of many different activities and things. What this shows is that the human heart is typically both polygamous and fickle—it has many objects of love, and these objects are always changing. This polygamous and fickle quality of human love is normal, and we have come to accept it as being so natural that we can’t imagine how else it could be. We think of it as a healthy thing; some people say that the more things we love, the healthier we are, because that means our heart is more open. 

Everybody will have hatred toward the other person for one thing or another. Most of us have to deny the hatred to have the love; it’s like our love is not powerful enough to hold the hatred—or, as the hatred arises, the love disappears. This is a question of splitting. Object love requires resolving the split between the loving relationship and the negative relationship, because any relationship contains both. Sometimes the person will irritate you so much that you hate their guts. But if the love survives even hatred, the way you act will be different than if the hatred were suppressed, for instance, and then is acted out in ways you’re unaware of.

What object love means is that your love can see and tolerate the whole truth of the situation: that there are things about your partner that you like, things about them you consider negative, and that you also have negativity. Your beloved has her quirks and limitations and problems. So do you. You have anger or dissatisfaction. Sometimes you are mad at your partner, sometimes you hate them, sometimes you don't want to be with them, but those feelings do not destroy the love that you have. If you can see that truth, you will be able to see the totality of the truth of the relationship, and the love will still survive. Your love can continue in spite of your own negativity toward the person.