8 Rules of Love: How to Find it, Keep it, and Let it Go

The ashrama system was created during the Vedic period and encompasses four stages of life: Brahmacharya, Grhastha, Vanaprastha, and Sannyasa. An individual moves through these stages from student life and religious learning to household or married life, to retired life and contemplation, to renounced life. The book connects these stages to the stages of love: preparing for love, practicing love, protecting love, and perfecting love. Individuals and couples move through each stage to enhance their relationships. 

Translated as “The Song of God,” the Bhagavad Gita is a key Hindu text akin to the Bible. It is a part of the Mahabharata epic and consists of a dialogue between the god Krishna and the leader in a battle, Arjuna, who resists fighting. Krishna and Arjuna discuss ethics, life, metaphysics, discipline, meditation, spiritual ideas, knowledge, devotion, and other topics to help Arjuna make the decision to fight. Eight Rules of Love applies concepts from the Bhagavad Gita to conflict between partners, discussed in Rule 6. It links the “energies of being” in the Bhagavad Gita—ignorance (tamas), passion and impulsivity (rajas), and goodness (sattva)—to different types of arguments and the “energy” they bring to a conflict (173-74).

Bhakti is the Sanskrit word for “devotion” and refers to the devotion a person feels for a deity. The Bhakti tradition was a religious movement from the seventh through the 17th centuries that emphasized this type of devotion.

The book connects its stages of falling in love with the divine to four phases of love. These stages consist of sraddha, a “spark of faith that makes us take interest in the divine”; sadhu-sanga, a need to seek a spiritual teacher; bhajana-kriya, the performance of “devotional acts, like attending services and praying”; anartha-nivrtti, becoming “free from all material attachments”; nistha, “steadiness [...] in self-realization”; ruci, “enthusiasm [...] for serving the divine”; bhava, the “preliminary stage of pure love of the divine”; and prema, or “pure love for the divine” (80). The book does not follow these stages exactly for its four phases of love but uses them as a foundation for moving from an initial encounter and attraction to a person to a deeper relationship, described in Rule 3. 

This is the first stage of the Vedic life stages, or student life. It correlates with the first section of the book, preparing for love by learning solitude and from past relationships to enhance future ones. Shetty emphasizes the importance of solitude because “alone, we learn to love ourselves, to understand ourselves, to heal our own pain, and to care for ourselves. We experience atma-prema, self-love” (13).

The second stage of the Vedic stages, or household life, coincides with practicing love and the second section of the book. Shetty suggests that individuals should continue practicing self-love while “learning to understand, appreciate, and cooperate with another mind, another set of values, and another set of likes and dislikes” (75). They practice love by communicating one’s definition of love, learning from a partner, and discovering their individual purposes. 

In Hinduism, a guru is a spiritual teacher who guides a student through intellectual, moral, and religious knowledge. In the ancient period, Gurus taught students the Vedas orally. The book applies the term to partners acting as gurus and students to each other in Rule 4. It includes guru qualities from Kripmaoya Das’s The Guru and Disciple Book.

The Guru and Disciple Book is a contemporary text published in 2020 and written by Kripamoya Das, a Hindu priest and student of the founder of the Hare Krishna movement. He was born in the UK and converted to Hinduism. The book outlines specific guru and student qualities and roles first detailed by Vedanta Desika, a medieval Indian philosopher. It also includes information on the Vedas, teaching and learning aspects, and other information about the guru-disciple relationship. Eight Rules of Love applies some of these qualities to being a teacher or student in a relationship in Rule 4. It provides Sanskrit terms for the qualities, Das’s translations, and their applications to relationships.

Karma means “action” in Sanskrit. In the Hindu tradition, karma is a way of thinking that involves choices, actions, and outcomes, rather than a cycle of negative events that occur due to bad behavior, which is the common way of thinking about karma in the West. Shetty describes a “karma cycle,” which starts with impressions from childhood that impact decisions in adulthood. These decisions have positive or negative outcomes, but people can modify these impressions to improve their decisions and the resulting effects.

Samskara means “impression,” particularly how karma leaves an impression on a person. It can also mean “rite of passage,” but Rule 2 of the book uses the first definition, in which past impressions from a person’s life impact their current experiences. These impressions consist of parental models, movie tropes, and first relationships. Shetty notes that “as an impression grows stronger, it starts to shape our decisions” (39). Individuals can change or revise these impressions to make better life and relationship choices.

This is the fourth in the four stages of Vedic life. It refers to renounced life, or the period when a person renounces the material life and focuses on service. The book reinterprets this stage as one when partners can perfect their love and share it with those outside of a romantic relationship, when “love becomes boundless [...] We feel karuna, compassion for all living entities” (245). In the book, this is the “highest expression of love” (245).