Over time, I've reworked my understanding of relating.  Check this out.  I start with the common sense view, supported by the logic of knowing by acquaintance ("knowing-who"), of unconditional or true love as the ideal relating.  Then, I note that the essence of love is relational freedom.  True love is alternately freeing to all involved and respects the freedom of each beloved.  At the heart of such freedom, though, is singularity.  Many scholars tend to use the word "individuality," but the term "singularity" evokes better the uniqueness of the person at stake.  To be free in relationship includes each of us being who we uniquely are, not someone else fantasized or projected.  What, though, is it to hold such singularity in practice and in relationship?  It is to wonder.

Think of the situation of actual people.  Love is not true when it is pathological.  Yet real people have some degree of narcissism as a part of who we are.  The work of love is in large part a complex effort to part the narcissism and assume it while holding open the freedom of each other.  Here, precisely, wonder goes right to the point of freedom in relationship in such conditions.  As my friend and colleague Urszula Lisowska has been writing, wonder is "non-appropriative."  In other words, the wonder is the heart of what resists love's pathological dimensions.

One Kierkegaardian claim (from his Works of Love) is that nothing in our lives would be of significance, and our lives would not make sense to us, if we did not love things first.  The idea is that love opens up the world to what matters to us.  So, love has to be the ground of personal sense.  If one does not love, life is personally meaningless.  That is the claim.  Note that is it moot about the pathology of real people and the need for wonder at the heart of love.

The world makes sense to us before we can engage in the relationship that is love or know what it is to accept love.  Attachment is natural to children, but attachment is not love yet.  It is need, not freedom.  To love is an achievement.  Rather, what is natural is the mind's original joy - our positive anxiety, excitement in being alive and becoming involved in things.  If we were not positively anxious to some degree, the world would not be meaningful.  It's possibilities would not spread out around us to consider.  The name for the mind's positive anxiety, however, is "wonder." 

It is the essence of wonder to try to make sense of things apart from one's attachment.  This allows wonder to ground relating to the world in its difference from us, not simply being self-absorbed about the world.  What matters for sense and meaning includes what matters for us, not just to us.  

We come back to wonder, not love, when grounding justness.  Being just is obligatory.  But love cannot be obligated, although there are obligations in love.  The other one loves is not in one's control.  The achieved relationship is grace, not duty.  You have to try and think about it" is a possible obligation, though.  Wonder can be a responsibility we expect of each other.