There are many kinds of love. The love that possesses. The love that needs. The love that admires. The love that needs to be needed. The love that is a form of self-extension. The love that is, in its honest moments, primarily about the feeling of loving rather than the person being loved.
The Bhagavata Purana makes a distinction that cuts through all of these: Sakama love, which wants something from the beloved, and Nishkama love, which wants nothing except the beloved's own complete expression.
The text is explicit about this. The celestial women — the Apsaras and the Devas' wives — also love Krishna. Their love is described as Sakama — it seeks union, seeks to possess, seeks the experience of being with. This love is real and is not disparaged. But it is second-order.
The Gopis' love is different. Shuka, narrating the Bhagavata to King Parikshit, says it directly: the Gopis loved Krishna not for what he could give them — not for moksha, not for heavenly experience, not for the bliss of union. They loved him for himself alone. Their love was so complete that it had no agenda beyond his flourishing.
The proof of this is given in one of the most extraordinary passages of the Bhagavata. Krishna asks the Gopis: what do you want from me? What can I give you in return for your love? And the Gopis respond — in what Rupa Goswami considers the highest theological statement in the Bhagavata: we do not want anything. Not your company. Not your grace. Not liberation. Not even the continuation of this love. We want only that you be what you are. That is the entirety of what we want.
Narada's Bhakti Sutras describe this state with the precision of a technical manual: when love for the divine has no admixture of personal desire, when it is continuous like the flow of oil, when the devotee forgets themselves, the world, and even the awareness of their own devotion — this is Para Bhakti, the highest devotion. Not a feeling to be achieved by technique. A dissolution to be allowed by the complete release of the agenda that normally organises all feeling.
The Gopis do not serve Krishna. They are not devotees in the conventional religious sense — performing practices in exchange for grace. They are something rarer: people who have found an object of love that is genuinely worthy of complete love — and who have, in the face of that love, released every vestige of the contractual nature that normally governs human affection.
They leave their homes without calculating the consequences. They leave their social positions without weighing the loss. They leave their obligations — to husbands, to families, to the social order — not in rebellion but in the simple recognition that the love they are responding to makes every other consideration secondary. This is not irresponsibility. It is the response of a consciousness that has correctly identified what is most real and oriented itself accordingly.
The tradition uses the word Dharma carefully here. The Gopis' action — leaving the social Dharma for the higher Dharma of the Atman's recognition of the divine — is not adharma in the ultimate sense. It is the one moment where the Bhagavata permits the transcendence of social duty in favour of the deeper recognition that social duty is itself meant to serve.