We will discover — if we look carefully — that when we see each other struggling with ourselves, struggling for inner presence and freedom; when we actually feel this struggle taking place in another person, we cannot help but love! Such love is not the love of passion or ego or familial warmth or shared history, or even the mystery of a moment of fused identity. Such love is a hitherto unknown, or, rather, unnamed, capacity that lies within every human being's power. It is love of the human struggle, of that in ourselves which wrestles with ourselves.
It is not love of virtue; it is the love of the struggle for virtue.
It is not love of strength; it is the love of the struggle to confront weakness.
It is not love of the spirit in another, or of the soul in another. It is love for that in another which yearns and struggles for spirit and soul, vaguely understood as these things are.
Such love is not something we "do." It is something that is given to us — from above and from within ourselves.
— Jacob Needleman, A Little Book on Love