Human Design Gates of Love

People love in different ways, and most of us learn early that our own way does not always match the people around us. One person needs to build something real with you before the feeling settles in, while another feels closest when there is something to mend or someone to care for. In Human Design, these differences show up in the bodygraph, in a set of gates that each carry the theme of love. The chart does not tell you whether you love well. It shows you the particular shape love takes in you.

Love and its opposite

In Human Design everything runs in duality, so the gates of love are also the gates of its opposite. Each one carries both "I love" and "I do not love." The same gate holds both sides at once, the capacity for the love and the capacity for its absence.

The chart holds two types of these gates. Four of them sit in the G center and carry what Ra Uru Hu called transpersonal love, a love that moves through a person toward something larger than any single relationship. Seven of them carry personal love, the worldly kind that is found with another person, through the living of certain themes together. Gate 10 belongs to both types, which is part of why it sits so close to the center of the whole question of loving.

Personal love: found with another

Personal love is about closeness. It comes into being through connection with another person. This is the more demanding territory, because two people bring two sets of needs, and the love here has to be worked out between them. These gates carry this worldly love, and each one carries its own condition for feeling loved.

Gate 10, Love of Self through Others - the potential to love yourself, reached through real closeness with another person. In the not-self, this turns into the belief that you cannot love yourself unless someone is there loving you first.

Gate 44, Successful Love - love that is felt through succeeding together. The voice of this gate looks for someone to build a successful life with, and it is often tied to the material side of things.

Gate 40, Deserved Love - the search for someone to work for, so that love can be earned through the work. In the not-self, it hardens into the sense that other people owe you love for everything you do for them.

Gate 58, Perfect Love - the pull to correct what feels imperfect. Lived well, it can point out to another what needs mending, offered from care for them. In the not-self, it becomes picking at a partner’s flaws to serve your own need.

Gate 41, The Dream of Love - the fantasy of love and of new experience. This is not the logic that wants things perfected. It is a pressure toward something not yet lived.

Gate 28, Love and Meaning - passion braided together with melancholy. There is a sense here that love without some measure of struggle does not register as love, alongside a search for the meaning of life through another person.

Gate 55, Indecisive Love - love that rises and falls with the emotional wave. Asked whether they love you, the honest answer is often “I do not know,” and that not-knowing can be painful, since there is only the present pulse to go on.

Transpersonal love: what moves through you

Transpersonal love is harder to describe, because it does not settle on one person. It is experienced as something passing through you toward something higher or further off. People with these gates can be deeply loving without that love being aimed at you in particular, which is confusing to be near until you understand it. Four gates in the G center carry this love, the vessel that holds it.

Gate 25, Universal Love - the least personal love of all, the love of the priestess and the mystic. These are loving people, though it does not mean they love you in particular. This is also the gate of romance, and of loving something out of reach.

Gate 15, Love of Humanity - love for humanity itself, held as a kind of higher meaning. A care for people in general more than a personal love for any one of them.

Gate 46, Love of the Body - the body met as a temple. It is connected to the fears of the Spleen, and when the sacredness of the body becomes real to a person, they stop doing what harms it. There is a recognition here that every body is beautiful.

Gate 10, Love of Being Alive - the most individual and self-directed of these gates, and the most melancholic. It asks what it means to be alive in this world. To love the way you move through your life is to love yourself.

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Living your own capacity to love

Ra spoke about this in a way that has stayed with me. He said that when you can see love as it is, you become able to be with someone because it is correct for you. That is a different thing from seeing potential in a person and staying in the hope of reshaping them into something better.

Human Design does not wash away the ideas about love that we absorb without noticing, the Hollywood version of how it is supposed to look. It returns us to our own version. When you live according to your own nature, you get to experience your particular capacity to love, and he called that something completely special.

What I keep returning to is that there is no general, correct way to love. The chart does not hand anyone a method to copy. It shows the particular shape love takes in one person, the specific conditions under which it is felt, and it points toward the work of coming to know that shape well. I am still learning mine.

If Human Design is new to you, my free Beginner’s Guide is a grounded place to start. If you want to sit with the Gates in your own time, the 64 Gates of Human Design Flash Cards in my shop walks through all sixty-four. When you would like to look at your own chart with someone, sessions are available to book.