Verses 1.19-1.20
Parakīya means ‘belonging to another, to a stranger, to a hostile’. A parakīyā is thus the wife of another. Parakīyā-bhāv is love for the wife of another, forbidden love.
Parakīyā-bhāv is traditionally denounced as a violation of traditional Vedic dharma. But in the Gaudya tradition it is venerated.
Rūpa Gosvāmī writes in Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi:
The supreme position of śṛngārara-rasa [loving feeling] is established in upapati [parakīyā-bhāv] or paramour love (1.19).
At first glance this notion may seem scandalous to us. Monogamous marriage is regarded as one of the pillars of society.
But this veneration of parakīyā-bhāv must be carefully understood. First and foremost, Kṛṣṇa’s parakīyā love for the gopis is entirely transcendental. It is part of the the internal, spiritual energy of God. It does not affect the morality of external, material relations.
More than that, Rūpa Gosvāmī and others praise parakīyā-bhāv for another reason: for the purity of the desire it manifests. Forbidden love is virtuous, they says, because it requires the gopis to show courage, resolve, and purity of intent in three ways: they must overcome the opposition of dharma, they must be secretive in their love, and they must enact this love in a way that requires them to win over enormous material obstacles (1.20).
And yet, an additional realisation will lead us to understand why love can have no rules: Love is not love if it is governed.
Love that is governed by rules that are external to it is not love.
Love that is governed by the norms and expectations, the laws and moralities, of those outside the loving relation, who do not know it or feel it, is simply not love
Any rule that says ‘love shall be this and not that’ has not understood love.
If there were rules of love then they would apply, by their nature, to all love, past, present and future. They would govern all loving relations, even those that do not yet exist. They would pretend to know the love they seek to govern before that love exists, to put it in a box, to put it in a prison.
But love is never finished becoming itself. It constantly transcends itself.
The true lover is not only in love, she is in love with being in love. She is learning in every moment what the experience of love is and can be, then learning it again, and again forever.
Love expands in this way just like the universe expands, exceeding itself, becoming more, greater, deeper. Love is the constant experience of never understanding quite enough about the love we are living, never knowing quite enough, never being quite finished with discovering it.
To love means to always fall short of realising what is happening, to be unequipped to understand, but, in the end, not wanting to.
This is the divinity of love. It will be always be beautifully, miraculously greater than us. To govern it with rules would make it smaller than us.
The love we experience can never know what it is, it must never know what it is.
Love does not simply increase like water filling a pot. It constantly redefines at every moment what it means to love and what it means to be a lover. And it constantly resets, redefines, what it means to be us, and what it means to love.
One never finishes being a lover. The task is endless, as are the rewards.