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| | A Love PolemicI wrote a blog a year or two ago entitled "Love in the Profound," it was an exploration of the idea of love as it has transferred through history into our contemporary notions of what love is. The complaint was that as we have modernized our world and our society, our ideas of love have remained static (stagnant?) and they became an open, festering, sore which only serves to breed dissatisfaction (as it is manifested in divorce or break-ups).
What I realized is that I spent more talking about what love IS NOT than what it actually IS. So that is the goal in this post. I think that the idea is pretty topical because lately, whenever I actually get around to surfing the blogosphere, I find myself stumbling across people lamenting the state of their relationships. If your relationship is failing, I encourage you to take a look at "Love in the Profound" and see if anything in that resonates with your problem--it very well may not. If you are beginning a relationship, hoping to start a relationship, or simply in a relationship and feel like you've found that special someone, perhaps I can give you reason to love more with this post...I don't know. I haven't written it yet.
Love very well might be the most elusive of emotions; a key concept in personal and social development that easily lends itself to self-definition. It is a term that is perpetually raped and bastardized, if for no other reason than because some people find themselves experiencing something that feels so incredible, and so good, that when they are hurt, they choose to proliferate their pain through a viral concept of love.
I can honestly say that I have never experienced such "passion" that, at its end, my faith in the idea of love was eroded--nor have I experienced such pain that my concept of love was ever made hollow. That said, I imagine that anyone who has experienced those things is so thoroughly embittered that my lofty articulation of love will appear either naive or, at least, inapplicable to their own experiences. But love is, I think, one of the few universals that actually exist in this world, and though your ability to navigate this chief emotion might be weighed down by your experiences, actually experiencing love in any proper sense should relieve you of your burden.
I say that because love is an antithesis of pain--certainly not a synthesis. Anyone who is experiencing pain but labeling the emotion associated with it as "love" is experiencing a particularly intense form of lust. "Lust" is addictive, much like any drug is addictive. The "passion" that people experience in "lust" stimulates the same kinds of chemicals in your brain as, perhaps, a bar of chocolate, coffee, tobacco, opium--a sudden and massive release of endorphins or, when it is highly threatening, an extended release of dopamine which can embed a feeling of dependency in spite of the bitter pain associated with the relationship itself.
I sincerely believe that love is a soft-dialectical process: it is a temporal competition between the forces of lust and angst. It is an emotion that cannot exist in the beginning of a relationship. There is no such thing as "love at first sight," but you can see someone only once and sense in that person that you could love that person for the rest of your life. However, such sensations are intangible--can be easily confused from lust--and must be responded to with caution, because, if one reduces such intense feelings to lust, then the opportunity to develop the relationship into one of love could be lost. Love, through the soft-dialectical process, slowly releases feelings of pleasure (dopamine) so that it can simultaneously reinforce the methods of exchange--which I will talk about in a moment--which allow for permanence despite one's mind, and perpetuate one's emotions towards that person at the same time.
Love is exchange until equilibrium; which, as I've said in the past, equilibrium is discovery of a state of empathy and respect. The exchange is one of differences. A couple, by virtue of their status, must engage one another's differences. As they come into contact with the differences between the other, they are expected to evaluate the significance of those differences: can I love this person despite this difference, is it something they are capable of changing, if they change it, are they the same person, is asking them to change this difference ethical. Love is experienced in growth, and the ultimate question will inevitably be--though it doesn't necessarily need to be expressed--can we continue? However, what I've expressed is a negative interpretation of love, and perhaps I should go back to explain why the problems in the relationship could (should?) be handled in this way.
Love takes time. Which is why it can't exist in the immediate. Love exists only after a couple knows enough about one another to affirm that the passion they feel towards one another will not be eroded by their differences.
Inherent in the words "I love you" is a declaration, it is a pronouncement that one promises to dedicate themself to their significant other--to struggle through their differences until they can cease to care about them. The words "I love you" are not blind declarations, which infer that despite the level of abuse levied against you, that you will still feel the same way about them. From the first "strike," love has been either altered or wholly discredited. The first experience which associates pain WITH love, inevitably infers that the love is not mutual. Which leads me to another important principle which I nearly forgot:
Love is mutual. Love cannot be one-sided, it must be shared. A one-sided "love" is the equivalent of the Christian-Greek "agape," it is the type of love that you have towards strangers. It is the love of unfamiliarity. Love, romantic love is inherently one of familiarity. It infers that two people know one another well enough to state, in as absolute a manner as a mortal being can, that the feeling that they have towards that person is entirely permanent. "Hurting" the one you love has only room to be incidental. Any purposeful action which happens to hurt your "be-LOVEd" is a disaffirmation of your own love. It essentially is saying that "my love is preconditioned upon 'x'" and your inability to be 'x' demands that I forgo my feelings and abuse you into submission. Such a "love" is fleeting, therefore, it is not love, but rather that all-inclusive intense "lust" I mentioned earlier. Point being, that a dissociative love is one that doesn't belong to a relationship. If you inflict pain upon your significant other, you have to feel it as well--otherwise you have made them a stranger and are not experiencing a love of mutuality, but one of estrangement. Estranged love cycles the process of lust so that the experience of "passion" is renewed in the pain (which apparently can also release the aforementioned biochemical stimuli). Such "lust" might feel good after the fact, but it is merely cathartic--it is a "good enough" feeling one might carry when elevation is not possible. There is a slow death in lustful reconciliation.
Hence, love is something that can only be discovered after discussion. In all likelihood, love will be experienced as an epiphany--rather than a hard-hitting emotion. It is likely to be something that you come to realize in the arms of your beloved, when it occurs to you that, the feeling that you feel, in that moment, has been and probably will always be the way that you will feel about them. In my perspective, love is an emotion that you forget to think about until the moment that it arises. Love doesn't have to be affirmed and confirmed verbally, it is affirmed and confirmed internally. Love is something that you know, it is knowledge, it is epistemic. But, like all knowledge, it has to be developed. You must create the schema, and for it to be healthy and enduring, you have to develop a thorough understanding of how it is and how to negotiate and maintain it.
Love has its roots in passionate lust. At that point, it is fine ceramics, unadorned and raw--but fragile. Over time, the walls of the--we'll say vase--grow thicker, you adorn it with truth, understanding and reconciliation. In time, the art of love becomes such a craft, and you personally become so skilled in it, that it can be done without any extra intense effort. Lust is not love, but love cannot be created without the original framework of passion.
You design your own love, but, experiences of pain are cracks, it is destruction in the seams, it is eroded material which cannot be recovered or plastered over effectively. The responsibility of a couple is to master the art of their own construction of love so that, on one hand it is never complete, and on the other, it will remain consistent, solid and beautiful for a lifetime (beyond?).
I won't discuss the role of sex in relation to love. Sex is a part of that personal construction of love which can only be decided through discussion. That said. I think my polemic is finished. I'll read it in a few days and see what I think of it. It will probably receive some edits and revisions and in a week or so, I'll be done with it. I'll be rethinking the idea of love for the rest of my life, and hopefully, towards the end, my polemic will instead be a genuine manifesto--something rich enough to express a lifetime of love and desire and touch upon a part of the human spirit which I can't seem to grasp today. They say that wisdom comes with age, I certainly hope so.
| | | Posted 4/30/2008 5:12 AM - 35 views - 2 comments
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