The Ambiguities of Love
For believers in God, love is immortality, the perfect happiness of heaven, or the perpetual renewal of life in reincarnation. Thus for the vast majority of human history, love has been perceived to be an attribute of God. For many, perhaps most on earth, it still is. Such believers secretly despair that human relationships could ever provide love that would satisfy them; though this is the last thought we’d find in their consciousness. Their cynicism toward earthly potential is totally concealed by the perfection of their lover, God.
Thus it could be said that in traditional religion we worship idealized intimacy; while in humanism we try and implement it. Though there are many unbelievers who are as cynical about earthly love as the believers. They play a whore’s game, i.e. one who pretends not to be need-fully vulnerable—in need of others—the most common form of which is living just to make money, on the cynical premise that it can buy anything worth having. When love given spontaneously from the heart is one of the dearest gifts of life.
As for earthly love, the problem has always been that love hungers, far more than it provides, though it perpetually pretends otherwise. It’s likely that there are two kinds of lovers on this planet, those who retain it from childhood; and those who lost love, suffering a broken heart. It’s equally likely that the second group is much larger than the first, though many of us pretend to have been loved when we weren’t. The litmus test of whether love is pretentious or real is whether someone is genuinely happy, not just in appearance, but deep down.
For most humans love has been identified as much, if not more with adversity and pain, as it has been a font of care and thoughtfulness. The demands of love have always been far greater than its gifts. This is not because we humans are bad—just primitive when it comes to creating this most wonderful of all emotional experiences.
Curiously, as education-prone we are as a species, we have never chosen seriously to study love, though that may be changing very recently. We’d much rather treat love as something that passively should be given to us, be able to assume its presence and expect its benefits—justifying rage when it fails. Thus love’s negative implications and products, like neglect, abandonment, child abuse and spouse battery are part of our normal diet. Incidentally, pain happens in both directions, is male and female driven, since violence is fundamentally a product of the heart not the body. Bodies simply act its vengeance, though there are many emotional ways to do the same thing.
There most be something very primary going on here for our need for love to be so compelling important to us, yet we expect so little of ourselves in bringing it about. For instance we work so much harder, and spend so much more time making money.
Lets examine what human love is in its better forms. To begin with, fidelity, touted for centuries as one of the greatest virtues, means to make things work in love, not just to stick around, our passive love strategy. A more active view of love would include the realization that love intimidates when it refuses to consider its mistakes, and carefully listen to them; realizing that the feeling of love is far more important to the lover, while the performance of love is far more important to the loved one. Add to this that conjugal fighting—hopefully meaning among friends—begins not with being right, but with possibly being at least partly wrong—in which case the fight is quickly over so learning can begin. It’s an attitude of mind, that who one is, as a person, doesn’t always fit the person we love; and love can’t fix this difference; it requires negotiation.
If these gifts seem far too arduous to bring to the table of love, consider two more that contain much greater difficulty. In order to do all of the above, one has to become a student of their lover; meaning look upon knowing them as a PhD dissertation that requires a great deal of research and lengthy study—probably over years. If we don’t know our lover as a different unique individual, with all of their particular traits, talents and vulnerabilities, then what seems right to us, and wrong to them, will never make sense; we’ll continue to butt heads, creating an environment of growing animosity that we escape nowadays by having serial sexual liaisons.
Finally the second huge task of love: provide a growing repository of time to allow our lover to ditch us for extended hours, in order to be utterly buried in themselves, a need which grows with age if creativity has seriously marked their life. Love binds us to each other, while creativity binds us to ourselves. Talent is a successful romantic attachment to the self, something equally important to being attached to one’s lover. A life-satisfied individuality does not mean doing it all by ourselves, as most of us think. It means doing ourself very well. The greatest gift a loving partner can offer is to support and encourage such endeavor.
