You know this state. Even if you have never heard its name.
You are with someone you love — fully present, no conflict, nothing wrong. And somewhere beneath the presence, a grief is running. The recognition that this will end. That this person will leave, or change, or die, or you will, and this — exactly this — cannot be held. The fullness and the grief are simultaneous. Not in opposition. The grief is produced by the fullness. The more completely you love what you are with, the more acutely you feel its impermanence.
Rupa Goswami has a name for this. Prema Vaicittya — the anxiety of Prema, the distress that arises even in union from the anticipation of separation.
The Radha described in the Ujjvala Nilamani experiences this continuously. Even when Krishna is beside her, she weeps. Her companions ask: why do you weep? He is here. He is with you. And she answers — in the verse that Rupa Goswami quotes as the highest example of this state — that she is weeping because she is so afraid of losing him that even his presence cannot dissolve the grief. The presence contains the future absence. The love is so complete that it has already experienced every possible form of loss within the fullness of the present moment.
The Bhagavata's commentators do not pathologise this. They identify it as the mark of the highest love — the love that has become so acute and so real that it can no longer pretend that impermanence is not the condition of everything it loves. Most love protects itself from this recognition by maintaining a slight distance from the beloved — a slight reservation that says: I am not completely here, because being completely here would mean feeling this completely. Prema Vaicittya is what happens when the reservation is gone and the love is all the way in. It is grief and fullness simultaneously — not alternating but co-present, not despite each other but because of each other.
The parallel in the Stoic tradition: the Memento Mori practice — remember that this will end — is not supposed to produce despair. It is supposed to produce presence. The recognition of impermanence as the condition that makes the present irreplaceable. Marcus Aurelius holding his child and knowing the child is mortal and feeling, in that knowing, the full weight of the love that the mortality makes possible.
The Bhakti tradition goes one step further. It does not merely accept this grief as the shadow-side of love. It valorises it — considers it the most refined form of love, the form closest to the divine love itself. Because the divine, in the Bhakti theology, loves the world with this quality: completely, knowing its transience, in the full recognition of every possible loss, without a single reservation.
Prema Vaicittya is the love that has stopped protecting itself. The love that is all the way in, carrying the grief that the depth of the love generates, not in spite of the love but as its most honest expression.
You know this state. The tradition simply tells you: this is not something wrong with you. This is what love looks like when it is real.