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…we don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.”
JACQUES MARTAIN
Jacques Martain was a French Philosopher and influential in the development and drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Love is confusing, love is hard, love is elusive, love is essential; but is love worth it? Shakespeare declared that, “The course of true love never did run smooth.”
Now let’s take a second to look at this… he was in the business of selling tragedy, so it would make sense that when he speaks of love, his love is fraught with problems, because people love drama. Yeah, that’s right, people love drama – you can deny it if you want, but you’re only fooling yourself. Take a look at Romeo and Juliet, it’s the most tragic tale of ‘Star Crossed Lovers’, and you would be hard pressed to find anyone in Western Culture who wasn’t familiar with the story, unless they had a super shit development and were raised by wolves in the Indian forest like Amala and Kamala. But really, how often does that happen? Which begs the question, have hundreds of years of thinking that love is a tragedy shaped our perceptions and expectations of love? Should love be this huge dramatic Tela Novela that will end with everyone’s death in vain desperation and despair? Well, everyone will die, that’s just the hard facts, but does it have to be in a love lost tragedy? Is life now imitating art? Walk with me, let’s explore this…
Love is perceived to be the most important quality in many people’s lives. It is the colour that illuminates the canvas of an otherwise dull existence, it very literally gives us meaning in our lives. Some people dream of falling in love, some people create the reality that they are in love – a delusion of sorts. Some people never find their true love but settle for the love of stability and comfort that a person provides them; which is very pragmatic and less dramatic. This could be stretched to fit the words of Jaques Martain, where we love the whole person, not what we want them to be, but what they provide us. It’s important to find someone that displays a set of values which reflect our own, and sometimes that person is the one that is closest to our ideal, not the one that is our ideal – our ‘true love’. And when that person says those three little words, “I love you” what you do next is pretty important. If you are the type of person Vonnegut is referring to in his cynical statement, “If somebody says, “I love you”, to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? “I love you too.”
But even if you don’t feel it, is it in your best interests to respond with, “I love you too”? What if you don’t? You may never get to see if you really can love that person. These are the questions that can race through your mind in that now awkward moment, and then you take too long to respond and it’s getting more awkward… just remember, it’s love – there is no right answer, it’s an emotion – not a math quiz. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should tell people you love them if that’s not even close to what you’re feeling, but love is messy, it’s like a dynamic continuum – a language we don’t understand – much like insight; once we think we know it, it changes. Look how Latin Americans view love, it’s comparable to how First Nations Canadians view snow – there are so many incarnations and manifestations and representations and explanations. There’s a falling in love, a being in love, a love of love, a love for your spouse, a love for your lover – not always your spouse – a before midday love, a breakfast love, a lunch time love… you get it right?
So when you think about true love, keep in mind, our ‘true love’ is often a perception, a fantasy, born from the pages of fiction, much like Juliet’s Romeo. And while that guy died for love – how beautiful – he died real young! I think it’s important to have realistic expectations of people and situations, and people in those situations. Otherwise you will find yourself at conflict with the reality that presents itself to you, unable to accept it. Which will lead to bitter disappointment, and you will always be wishing you ordered the other dish than the one you have in front of you. If your life needs some more drama in it, maybe it’s your responsibility to explore that and solve your own emotional Rubik’s Cube, and not the responsibility of your partner.
That being said, love is beautiful and love is intoxicating! Love makes us realize why we have emotions in the first place! To be in love is the most wonderful feeling – so much so that some people are in love with being in love, and like the damaged soul that buys puppies and then gives them away once they leave the puppy phase; they don’t move on from the feeling of love. Because after that ‘honeymoon phase’ as Shakespeare puts it, “Love is a familiar. Love is a devil.” It tempts us to do things we would not normally do, like the serpent with an unsuspecting Eve, it manipulates us to believe all manner of things. But can you imagine a life without love??? It would have empty museums, only textbooks in the library, it would be passionless and devoid of color. As a psychologist, many of my clients are searching for love, or have realised that they have fallen out of love and found another love – expand your mind, I’m not just talking about people cheating on their partners, but people’s jobs as well #eyeroll.
In this search, this arid wasteland of lost love – almost a different dimension once you’ve been in love and experienced love – we often feel a loss of autonomy, the absence of control. It’s something we want, something we need, but we can’t get it, we can’t just create it. So many of us take a very fatalistic approach to love and hope that it will find us without too much activation of agency. You have heard your friends prophesize, “As soon as you’re not looking for it, it’ll find you”, so you go about actively ‘not looking for love’, whatever that bizarre concept looks like in your world. But really, they don’t know, it’s just nicer that them saying, “Stop talking about it – I can’t help with this problem”. And that might be true, maybe love has a plan all its own and we are merely pieces on the chess board, think Leonardo DiCaprio on his knees screaming at the heavens, “I am fortune’s fool”. But sometimes it’s important to put our over-achieved sense of entitlement aside and look at what we do have; because there is love all around us. Embodied by Vonnegut, although cynical as he would appear, when he said, “There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.”
Love is the most essential ingredient in the rich tapestry of life, and yes it’s hard, yes it’s uncomfortable, and yes it’s confronting – but we would be worse off without it. And without love, we have nothing to hope for, nothing to work for, nothing to live for. So next time you see someone you love; say those three little words, and hope that they say them back, because if you do love someone, then your life has a greater richness and meaning than it did before meeting that person, so I believe they deserve to know that.
by Geoffrey Fox, inlyfe co-founder + clinician
