If the Guru Granth Sahib has a single recurring emotional situation, it is separation: a soul apart from what it loves, aware of the distance, unable to close it by effort.
The convention comes from the devotional poetry of northern India and the Granth uses it more consistently than most of its sources. The soul is figured as a bride and God as the husband; the condition of the bride is waiting; the images are of the unadorned woman, the empty bed, the message that has not come, the other who is favoured, and the long night.
Three things follow that matter for reading the volume accurately.
The register is not triumphant. A reader expecting the scripture of a community known historically for martial resilience often finds the actual tone surprising, and the surprise is a misunderstanding of what the resilience was built on.
The voice is female, and the composers were men. What that arrangement does, and what it implies about the tradition's account of women, has been examined closely in modern scholarship, with readings that range from treating the figure as purely conventional to treating it as substantively significant.
And the separation is not presented as a problem with a technique for solving it. What is offered is the divine name held to, and the company of those who hold to it, which is a relationship rather than a method.