Haddaway asked the question back in 1992. Being all of six years old at the time, I was too preoccupied determining the Easter Bunny’s authenticity to give the topic due consideration. It wasn’t until 2004 that my fixation with left-hemisphere pursuits loosened its grip enough as to allow an earnest foray into the furthest reaches of the foreign domain: love.
What initially began as a simple curiosity to which I stupidly thought there was an answer, spawned into something of an exodus, consuming excess of 1,200 hours and 5,000 pages of written communication over the course of five years – and counting. I have been on an eye-watering number of first dates and am only marginally the wiser than my naïve seventeen year old self.
Attempting to demarcate the essence of love is on par with trying to catch the falling rain with a butterfly net – love doesn’t lend itself to my usual mode of analysis in the slightest. As such, I preface the following invective with an acknowledgement it will be speculation whose basis is semi-empirical evidence at best, and pure subjective opinion at worst.
My ambivalence toward the subject made it necessary to utilise two distinct frames: nostalgic romantic and detached rationalist. It has been written as dialogue between two minds, each possessing a degree of insight into the other. A narrator mediates intermittently and colours the milieu where appropriate.
~
Early one autumn afternoon, Sol sits slouched lazily on a park bench by an artificial lake, feeding ducks with crumbs from an old loaf of bread – pausing intermittently to append a random thought or observations to his ageing leather notebook, the grain chaffed and worn from its travels.
What is love? One can go through a mind-numbing number of iterations and permutations. It is an emotion, a concept, a force, an action. The more one tries to understand it, the more evasive it becomes.
His mind draws a blank: the pen isn’t out of ink, but the hand holding it is gauche. Looking toward the clouds for inspiration, thoughts cast adrift like the ashen wisps above.
Minutes pass, a tap on the shoulder brings him back to reality. ‘How long have you been sitting there like that?’ Her melodic, incisive tone had an air of familiarity about it. It takes a couple of seconds for the face to register – much older and wiser than when he’d last seen it in Introductory Psychology at university some dozen years ago. He can’t help but smile ‘I’ve…it’s been a while, Luna’
Though they’d only been classmates for one semester prior to his transfer, there was an unusual acquaintance between them that somehow survived despite the passage of all those years. They’d been assigned as unlikely partners on a research project and would constantly debate the finer points of theory and practice; hers was a highly clinical leaning, his angle more abstruse.
Their paths diverged with their degrees. Studying the mind, even for a few months, imbues insight into the self incomparable to that afforded by other domains. Luna was fascinated by its machinations, her voracious appetite for knowledge and passion to understand saw her blaze a trail, graduating top of the class. Her rise through the profession was meteoric, she completed a PhD in record time, and was running her own practice by the age of twenty-eight.
Sol wasn’t blessed with Luna’s academic faculty, and though he enjoyed learning, was often bewildered by the density of textbooks and found it difficult to grasp much of psychology’s clinical complexity. In spite of this, he managed to pass the unit on the grace of his uncanny insight into people, their motives and interaction. Aware this learning disposition would hinder his ambition of becoming a practitioner, he decided to turn the limitation into an advantage, and transferred overseas to pursue studies in Sociology and Anthropology. Sol’s motive power didn’t come from thermally bound knowledge, and no sooner than he’d begrudgingly completed his degree, he packed his life into a backpack and ventured out to explore foreign lands. His knowledge of living became the sum product of chance conversations over the years spent travelling.
Whilst Luna commanded the earnings of an eminent specialist, Sol made a comfortable living between his day job as a taxi driver and the royalties accruing from photographs taken on his travels, which were exhibited and often published for their raw depiction of culture.
~
Frame I: Objects of Love
The interaction between Luna and Sol had never followed provisions of social contract. Though over a decade had passed since their paths last crossed, there would be time for pleasantries later. For the moment; she had an intellectual curiosity that needed satiating.
LUNA I know that pensive look – what’s on your mind?
SOL How different the world be if everyone had your candour Luna. Don’t ask me why, but my mind has been dwelling on the matter of love lately. I feel it is something very much misunderstood and simplified; to the peril of its realisation. I’ve made a project of better understanding its intricacies, if for no other reason than to help me know when and if I find it.
Intuiting where the conversation was going, Sol pre-emptively moves his bag aside. With a solitary fluid movement, the vacated space is at once assumed.
LUNA Ok, I’m in. What’ve you come up with so far?
SOL My thoughts are somewhat scattered. Aside from this illegible scrawl on various tangents, I’ve made a modest start.
Flipping to the antecedent section of his notebook, reserved for lucid writings, he begins to read the product of the last two hours aloud.
SOL Classically, love has been dissected along the line of its object. Where the object, the beloved, is inanimate, conceptual or otherwise, it is termed impersonal love, and where the object is another human being, it is deemed interpersonal love. Further, interpersonal love can be either romantic or platonic in nature.
However, it ought to be recognised that the classical division is intrinsically unsound on grounds of internal paradox. Conflict arises when attraction is given a strong-form definition. Employing a scientific equivalent, the force of magnetism is like-for-like: the phenomenon exists exclusively between two magnetic objects. I can’t say a magnetised steel nail is attracted to, nor repelled by for that matter, a piece of wood. Between a magnetic object and a neutral object, magnetism cannot exist. Applying this rule, we conclude that love, attraction specifically, can only exist on condition of like substance. Perhaps not all of humanity actually loves per se, but the presence of capacity to love is adequate to validate the conjecture. A person cannot love an animal any more than a bottle of Vodka can love Planned Socialism.
LUNA So you’re contending that love must necessarily be shared between people?
SOL That is the gist of it.
Her irises flare almost imperceptibly.
LUNA Let me play Devil’s Advocate for a moment. I’ve counselled patients who’ve loved their cars more than their partners, their jobs more than their families, and their pets more than their friends. What makes you so certain a person’s highest degree of love can only be directed toward another person? How does your argument stand up against religion? All the devout believers who hold their deity above everything else – are you saying they’re wrong?
SOL As I understand it, yes. Love is for the most part reciprocal. There are a few exceptions, but generally speaking, without objective reciprocity, then what you have isn’t love, it is either worship or drudgery. I can share my deepest emotional anxieties with my pet Iguana, but the Iguana can’t be receptive or understanding like another person, no more than it can express its feelings to me. It is the same with everything else – I can pray, but I need to have faith that there’s someone or something listening, and that he, she or it actually cares.
People lie, yet in spite of this, I know that if there is one singularity I can communicate with, it is another human being. As long as this existence is reality, and reality is our only handle on truth; then you and I sitting here engaging in conversation proves the point. Love needs to be defined in terms of equitability, or at least potential equitability. I maintain that the only objective capacity for love which can be matched against an individual, is that of another individual.
Show me something with a heart, mind and consciousness that isn’t human and I will retract my premise in its entirety.
LUNA You’re amusing when you get defensive. I agree insofar as your supposition that love needs to flow both ways, though I prefer look at it in a different light.
Five years ago, when I was studying for my PhD, I composed a loose theory on the exchange of energy for one of my theses, which fits your hypothesis quite well if you invoke love as a currency.
What you’re essentially saying is that love is an energy exchange or transaction, and you’re imposing a hurdle on the ‘fairness’ of the transaction, which can be modelled using a recourse coefficient. All other things being equal, if I bought you lunch; the recourse coefficient to me would be zero. But if you bought me lunch the next time, it would equalise to one.
Love engages in the same way, and I agree that to call it ‘love,’ there has to be some adequate level of reciprocity, ideally as close to one as possible.
SOL Not so – I can think of at least one instance of love where that coefficient could be zero.
Consider the relationship between a mother and newborn. The mother loves the infant, directing enormous amounts of physical and emotional energy toward the child, in many cases prioritising the baby ahead of herself. On the flipside, the baby, being incapable of complex cognition, cannot reciprocate any measure of love; much less comprehend it, even in the most rudimentary sense.
Evidently we’re being too broad in our enquiry. Perhaps we should constrain our analysis. Let’s concentrate on romantic love.
LUNA Seconded, otherwise we’d be liable to spend weeks splitting hairs.
So, we’ve established that love is, in principle a human phenomenon, that a unitary recourse coefficient demands an equal reciprocal flow of love, that romantic love requires reciprocity, and further that romantic love is stronger the closer this coefficient is to one. The reversal is that as the coefficient approaches zero, the relationship regresses and deteriorates.
Frame II: An Exploration of Romantic Love
LUNA Seeing as we’ve now addressed context, how do you propose we delineate romantic love?
SOL Allow me to preface by saying the definition is frustrated. Because love is very much individual, there is no universally agreed designation of what love is, thus rendering all analysis subjective. Without an anchor, it can float in any direction.
Personally, I am quite fond of Ayn Rand’s definition of love: the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one for the joy received from the virtues of another.
He pauses, staring up at the leaden sky momentarily, before returning his gaze to Luna.
SOL Unfortunately, her definition isn’t specific to romantic love, which has sent me back to my drawing board.
Luna drums her fingers on the park bench as her mind searches for something.
LUNA Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other, each is enriched by the other. Felix Adler.
I’m good – you can say it.
Reaching into the bag, Sol proffers a piece of the stale bread, and offers it to Luna teasingly.
SOL Oh I know you’re good, would you like a reward?
She snatches the bread and casts it melodramatically over her shoulder.
LUNA The way I see it, romantic love is characterised by two rudiments: the force of attraction, and the energy of affection. Attraction is what draws two people together, and affection is the shared warmth between them. Romantic affection amplifies the sentiments of caring, and goodwill, but more importantly, it infuses communication and interaction with a unique sensuality which isn’t replicated in any other class of relationship.
SOL Attraction and Affection. I picked up a fare earlier this week, and we got to discussing how those elements materialise in different guises. Her last two relationships embodied one such timeless difference. The first relationship was characterised by feelings of craziness: intense enjoyment and blithe freedom. Her partner initiated this craziness at a ten on the scale, and she was able to respond with an eight. I suggested this was an example of ‘passionate’ love dominating. The second was more an affair of ‘intimate’ love. Whilst she didn’t feel trusting toward her ‘passionate’ partner, she trusted her ‘intimate’ partner implicitly. On the flipside, where it came to that ingredient of craziness or ‘magic,’ she was left wanting. Not being a natural instigator, she could only initiate craziness at eight on the scale, and her partner would reciprocate with a six.
It is open to debate as to whether the degree of ‘magic’ experienced is the average or the lower of the two, but it stands to reason this measure has clear implications for the intensity of passion in a relationship.
Were we to divide the elements of love into the child and the adult, the reckless/crazy juvenile who lives for the moment and does not care for consequences is more indulged where the two individuals are strongly attuned to or aligned with their child. ‘Magic’ is the upshot to the extent the child is better able to disengage from reason and reality.
By contrast, the companionate aspect of love engages deeper adult emotive forces, namely trust and sincerity – it has a long term focus. I cautiously posit that with age and maturity, the companionate aspect gradually becomes more important for reasons of stability and psychological comfort. Whilst a relationship should never lose its ‘fire,’ the magic and excitement brought by the child; one must nevertheless remain cognisant of the fact a fire will not burn for long without fuel to sustain it. In a roundabout way, this encapsulates commitment.
There’s a strong semblance to various hypotheses on ‘New Relationship Energy,’ describing the initial honeymoon phase as the essence of an induced high, which quickly withdraws or burns out as the accelerated rate of consumption exhausts fuel faster than it is able to regenerate. From the grains of truth I have collected on my travels, this is one of few tried and tested empirically.
LUNA You’re traversing a path similar to the one that led Robert Sternberg toward his Triangular Theory of Love, which stipulates passion, intimacy and commitment as the three basic elements. When combined in various ways, these elements constitute seven types of love. Under his model, passion and intimacy together form the basis for ‘romantic love,’ but compassionate love, the ‘holy grail,’ requires the third element: commitment.
I think we’re approaching clarity of definition, but we need to invoke commitment. Temporality is the missing link. Romantic love can be either transitory or enduring. Passionate love is transitory, but merged with commitment; it becomes enduring compassionate love. Semantics is a strange route to get there, but the logic supports a conclusion that commitment governs between transitory and enduring.
SOL Despite all we’ve said about dividing love into its elements, I’m still inclined to view it more simplistically: as an adventure.
I’m speaking of love in the same breath as adventure because the two concepts are inextricably linked. Neither know boundaries, both are indelibly exciting and dangerous, neither follow logic, and both are impulsive and unpredictable. One cannot plan an adventure anymore than one can force love. There is only the heat of the moment and enduring momentum. Life is an adventure that gets progressively more interesting, and love is an irrational but integral part of that adventure. Life would be at a great loss without love, and dare I say it, living and loving are not too dissimilar in form and meaning.
LUNA Brilliantly poetic – have you ever considered a career as a writer?
SOL Career is such a dirty word – it is a pastime. Money should never motivate a creative pursuit; such a betrayal pollutes the sincerity of expression.
Speaking of motivations, I’ve a question to ask of you Luna; why do you love?
Frame III: Motivation to Love
The loaded question provokes a flashback. Luna recalls the story of a Professor setting an open essay with the question ‘Why?’ One word. His students wrote extensive, complex responses: ten, twenty pages. Only one submission received full marks. It was a blank sheet, save for two words: ‘Why not?’
LUNA Why do I love? There are a few reasons, and I am tempted to launch into lecture, but sometimes the answer is surreptitiously simple. I love because it makes me feel good, and to be loved back.
SOL Interesting that you should mention both – most people I ask only identify the one, but they often don’t recognise that the two motivations are intimately associated. Would it still make you feel good if you weren’t loved back?
LUNA Dispassionately, it wouldn’t, and I wish I’d learnt as much earlier. Loving for the sake of being loved back appears a selfish motivation on face value, but it is no different from any other motivation, they’re all selfish.
At least in a romantic context, there is no such thing as selfless love, it does not appear love can be justifiably separated from pleasure. All routes of justification lead to some form of psychological satisfaction. The raison d’être for romantic love is intrinsically possessed of a selfish element.
Granted what we get in return may not always be love, we still get something.
SOL My thoughts exactly. It concerns me when I cross paths with self-styled martyrs who believe loving is selfless and noble, because it truly isn’t. Self-serving behaviour is dominant, anything contrary is regressive and eventually becomes extinct. Love’s prevalence attests to its selfish nature.
Which isn’t to say selfishness is a bad thing; more often than not, the fruits of our endeavour toward happiness are shared.
LUNA Shared happiness – that opens up another door: love and marriage. Notions of shared happiness are common to both, and there are parallels between what motivates each.
SOL Despite love and marriage sharing common premises, marriage needs to be kept divorced from love, if you’ll excuse the pun. Conceptually the two are far from interchangeable and their overlap is chronically overestimated. Marriage is the social institutionalisation of love.
But you’re right, in terms of motivation, there are many parallels between love and marriage.
I attended a talk given by Alain de Botton some months ago, during which he made quite a salient point in that prior to the eighteenth century; you married someone not for love, but because their family’s farm adjoined yours.
It got me thinking about convenience. Alain was pointing out that historically, the ‘marriage of convenience’ was not only socially acceptable, but quite normal. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I look around, and can’t help but notice the contemporary notion of love is moving in the same direction: convenience.
Where do we draw the line?
LUNA No, you’re onto something there. Now that I think about it, a common theme I often note about many of my Generation Y patients is their pursuit of instant gratification. It manifests primarily in a material sense, but also in the metaphysical. They spend now rather than save for a rainy day, their thoughts seldom dwell beyond the upcoming weekend, and their attitude toward relationships leans heavily toward utilitarianism.
Clearly, utilitarianism is a harbinger to a reweighting of perspective such that the significance of long term stability and profundity yields to short term convenience benefits encompassing physical contact, intimacy, time structuring, social conformity and comfort. As this attitude becomes more ingrained, we get a self-reinforcing decay in the definition and esteem of love.
I’ve always held that a relationship whose predominant component is convenience is not love, rather a repetitive commercial transaction involving inferior currency.
SOL I sense there’s a conflict between what you think and what you feel. Why is finding love so significant in your life?
LUNA I’m thirty-two, run my own practice, I’ve travelled the world, and am at the stage where the only thing missing is a relationship. If I could find that final piece of the jigsaw, I’d be a very happy woman indeed.
Sol sighs, fumbles for a piece of bread and casts it out onto the water. A nearby flock of ducks scramble toward it, but are outfoxed by a sly seagull that had been eyeing the bag of bread intently for some time. He smiles, amused by the apt reminder of patience.
SOL Would I be accurate in saying you’ve had a string of intense relationships, but at some point in each, you suddenly realised it wouldn’t work out long term?
LUNA The generalisation you’ve just made would apply to most people. Fortunately for you, I am one of them. Tell me why I’m conflicted.
SOL You’re conflicted because your mind rails against love being a convenience, yet you’re subconsciously pursuing it for similar reasons: the missing piece to your puzzle. I have known people who’ve pursued love to fill a gap, a partner who completes them. Each time, their endeavour has ultimately come to grief.
Pausing to remove a bottle of water from his bag, he finds a metaphor.
SOL Say I had an open wine bottle – it makes sense for me to find a cork that fits snugly to ensure the wine keeps. This mindset is too often prevalent in the perception of love. You find a cork to plug the bottle. You’d be familiar with this thought pattern from your patients.
Under assumption of homeostasis, there is nothing logically wrong with trying to find a fit. However, reality is not homeostatic – the aperture of the bottle and cork are both dynamic: they grow. If a close correspondence between size of the aperture and the cork is not maintained, one of two things must eventually happen. Either the cork will fall and drown in the wine, contaminating it in the process, or the bottle will shatter under excessive pressure caused by the cork. Relationships respect this rule when they exist as ‘plugs’ for holes in either or both partner’s lives.
The first equivalent outcome is that the bottle, a proxy for individual’s emotional/psychological needs, outgrows the cork, which is a proxy for partner’s capacity to fulfil them, and the cork is no longer enough to ensure the wine keeps. If you like, the cork feels inadequate, the bottle resentful, and either initiates a dissolution.
The second equivalent outcome is that the cork, or the partner’s emotional maturity, outgrows the bottle, in this case the emotionally immature individual, and the bottle is shattered. The cork awakens, and initiates dissolution, causing the bottle to suffer damage.
This feeds directly into causes for dissolution. When we look at life as a jigsaw, something we all do, we often neglect dynamism, the tendency for the picture to change. We concentrate on finding the piece which fits the best now, but don’t think much about how the picture will look ten or twenty years from today.
From what you’ve revealed, your relationships have always been fulfilling in the moment, but have corroded because you’ve been on different tracks, one growing faster, the other slower. At some point the distance becomes so great you can’t see them anymore. Further, it seems you’re looking for a missing piece.
Frame IV: Love, Despondency and Indifference
LUNA Perhaps I should be the one sitting on the chaise lounge? You’ve made a fair assessment, but your logic has committed an error of omission. I’ll concur there may be some merit in saying love should not be a prosthetic that completes, but you can’t escape the fact it is a band-aid.
Rather than make a rash generalisation, take a step back. Love is also one of few socially acceptable mystic coping mechanisms for living anxiety, arguably more prevailing than the likes of religion.
You cannot therefore deny ‘filling a gap’ as a valid motivation. To the extent love assuages anxiety, it is by definition compensatory. To elucidate, I used to debate internally the question ‘does love miss?’ or, rather, ‘should love miss?’ Conventionally, when one is in love, and there is an unforeseen and prolonged separation, such as a lengthy and unexpected overseas trip, feelings of loss, withdrawal and anxiety are typically borne by both individuals. The evidence that we don’t reconcile with and accept separation without ill feeling, rather allow it to persist as a thorn in our side illustrates that love fills a gap; otherwise, we wouldn’t miss.
To validate the compensatory aspect of love, consider the misalignment of society itself. Having even one person ‘understand’ you goes some way in mitigating the crippling loneliness most people would feel if we were to strip away all other psychological distractions. The world is a very false and apathetic place, thus the value of finding truth and love to assuage this piercing feeling of loneliness is profound.
SOL We’ve a lexical misunderstanding. I’ll need to backtrack and refine my logic.
If we take ‘filling a gap’ as being finding that person that fits with your life, someone to accompany you on the rollercoaster ride, to fill the empty seat next to you, I have no issue with that and can identify with needing to find that missing piece.
What you’re articulating isn’t so much filling a gap as plugging a hole. Metaphorically, one fills a gap for the sake of structural or aesthetic completeness, but one plugs a hole to prevent a ship from sinking.
Using love to plug a hole is effectively unidirectional stabilisation, whereby one partner becomes the emotional crutch preventing the other from falling over.
I take issue here because unidirectional stabilisation can be viewed as an emotional power differential that persists to one side, and is therefore a charge/custodian relationship, as opposed to an equitable union.
LUNA If you’re invoking equitability, then it implies two people who are similarly damaged by the world, two people who do not ‘love’ themselves; can form a relationship of bidirectional stabilisation. They would still have an equitable union.
SOL In all honesty, I haven’t considered that angle. Can we invoke the mathematical reasoning that if love is a pairing of like charges, then the two charges could be negative, as well as positive? I’m afraid I don’t have an answer to that question.
LUNA It’s beside the point in any case. Back to our thread of discussion, there are a lot of sinking ships out there. I’ve an inkling the vast majority feel there is something fundamentally wrong with the world, but find the fact so painful to confront they subconsciously structure their lives to avoid an encounter with the question. Perhaps it shouldn’t be, but love is an elegant solution to this problem.
SOL I’ll give you that. Your interpretation is realistic, because the feeling of which you speak is insidious, though you’re neglecting the comorbidity. The world’s ‘fundamental wrongness’ is borne of two deficiencies, thus can only be resolved by correcting both.
Love and justice are the two wings upon which humanity is carried. In the absence of either, we will fall. One of those wings is broken, and the other, even beating in double time, cannot compensate.
Soothsayers preach ‘love is all you need,’ but there is a reason this mindset fails. Indeed, love is a lever that can move the world, but justice is its fulcrum – and insofar as corruption and subversion of justice persist, love’s exertion will forever be in vain.
For love to be an omnipotent solution, sufficient unawareness is required. To those who live without cognisance, love can surmount most anxieties, death being the only exception. Once we reach a point of critical awareness, we realise love is only part of the solution, and that the world righting itself isn’t quite as simple as the ‘good’ that is love triumphing over the evil of hate.
Whilst dark is the absence of light, the truism does not hold when the poles are replaced with love and hate. Love’s opposite is indifference, hate is its inverse. Indifference is the absence of feeling. Love and hate are the two extreme states of projected feeling. The universe is neutral, indifference is its natural state, but we as humans have the capacity to go either way. So the battle is one in which the active forces of love and justice are pitted against indifference, their common enemy.
Luna, engrossed in the philosophical foray, but not wanting to appear as such, removes a tube of aubergine lipstick from her handbag and begins to apply it, feigning disinterest.
LUNA Sol, that was a digression of biblical proportion. At no point in that diatribe did you speak to the topic we are engaging.
Frame V: The Ignition of Love
Forcing a faux cough, Sol returns fire.
SOL Lipstick isn’t necessary if you’re trying to seduce me. You had me at hello.
Believe it or not, I was leading into the ignition of romantic love before I was so discourteously interrupted. Specifically, any move away from that base state of neutrality, directed toward another, engenders the development of an affective relationship. Love is one of the positive routes diverging from the neutral state.
LUNA See, it is that divergence which interests me. I’ve lost track of the anecdotes I’ve heard about instantaneous divergence to the positive extreme, more commonly known as love at first sight. Can love be ignited by eyes locking across a train carriage? Is there such thing as an instant connection?
They are rhetorical questions. Instant connections are feasible, but love at first sight is fictitious and ignorant of certain prerequisites. A pertinent example is communication involving cognitive exchange. Whenever I hear a story about falling in love after a five minute conversation, or worse still upon seeing someone for the first time, it disconcerts me. It is beyond my understanding how any person can develop the necessary conviction to appellate love given such inadequate information.
The gravity of such a decision warrants much more consideration than many give it. As far as investments go, your biggest investment decision in life won’t be buying a home, but whether you’ll have a life partner, and who that person will be. No other venture compares in terms of outlay: time, energy, even your ‘soul’ to an extent. It is not something to be taken lightly, which is why love at first sight is altogether foolish.
Further, I believe there is a kinaesthetic prerequisite, which stipulates communicative exchange must occur in person. I am increasingly sceptical about ‘love’ via such conveyances as telephone and internet. Energy of this nature cannot possibly be conducted via copper wires. As the sparks fly, love bridges physical space like a bolt from a Van de Graff generator, it cannot be instigated in any other medium.
SOL Talking prerequisites, considerations of exchange are important I’d agree, but the imperative criterion that qualifies one to love is self-worth. To say “I love you,” one must first be able to say the “I.”
Rand’s quote, not mine, but a slam dunk nevertheless. I don’t believe it possible to truly love someone else if you do not love yourself. It is a prerequisite to love that the heart must first beat on its own accord, and so must pump blood to itself. Love cannot be projected from a comatose heart.
LUNA If an unconscious heart can’t love, how would you define consciousness? One could argue being in love, under a spell, is itself a lapse of consciousness. When people fall in love, they often become less conscious.
SOL On the first point, you’ve got to question whether we have control over the emotion, or whether we are spellbound into it. My conceptual understanding is that love, indeed falling in love can resemble a loss of consciousness because it involves a degree of surrender. Perhaps this is why the operative verb is ‘falling.’
Personally though, I’ve always had trouble with the imagery. Is the pit bottomless? Do we ever hit the bottom, or are we constantly ‘falling’ in love? I’ve found love more of a climb. One falls, or rather plummets haphazardly into infatuation, not love. Love is more methodical than we care to admit to ourselves.
I have stupidly ‘fallen’ into infatuation before, obstinately assuming an overconfident understanding, only to be proven wrong. I thought I had a handle on love – many times, but it has taken me the better part of a decade to recognise love for what it is.
It is like being given a seed. You don’t know what kind, but you look for a good patch of soil, plant it, water it, and watch what develops. The planting phase can be methodical if we so desire. Often the seed doesn’t sprout at all, other times what does grow withers and dies. But every now and again, one of those seeds will develop into an enduring tree of friendship. Sometimes we are treated to a surprise even rarer: as the exquisite flower of love blossoms and flourishes.
Without realising it, we are all planting seeds. If life were a garden, we’d desire a few sturdy oaks to lean against, elms to provide cover from the elements, and perhaps varieties of maple and cherry for colour. At the heart of the garden, the centrepiece, is a flower: a scarlet rose, a pallid orchid, a vivid yellow daffodil; a pleasure to behold. Its image is the quintessence of mystical beauty to the eye of its beholder, and its scent, that of an enthralling opiate.
Unconsciously betraying her awkwardness with Sol’s quixotic allegory, Luna shifts posture.
LUNA Let’s go for a walk, I need a change of scenery. Besides (glancing down at the empty bread bag), you’re out of ammo.
SOL So I am.
As the two abandon the park bench, sheets of light drizzle begin to fall. Luna produces a scarlet cylinder from her handbag, which she deftly transforms into a surprisingly broad canopy.
LUNA I know a hideout nearby, fancy a coffee?
He gestures to link arms.
SOL Given you’re the one with the umbrella, I don’t believe I have a choice.
Frame VI: The Growth of Love
Twenty minutes’ reflective silence underlines the route to Luna’s café. By the time they arrive, the drizzle has intensified to a lashing downpour. The wall of warmth and chatter that hits them crossing the threshold into the café is a welcome contrast to the cold sterility outside: two extremes separated by a windowpane.
Typifying gender roles, Sol commandeers a table whilst Luna saunters toward the counter to inspect the sweets.
Surveying from his post at a corner table, Sol can observe the whole cafe. Bluestone walls, dark floorboards of perhaps teak or jarrah; distressed tables made from old polished railway sleepers, and chairs upholstered in weathered chocolate leather. It is busy, but quiet. A gentleman in his fifties wearing a driver’s hat sits alone at the far end, immersed in The Art of War. At the table adjacent, a posse of young bohemians gossip in hushed undertones. They are stealing glances toward the counter, where a tall, rugged-looking barista operates the vintage fire-engine red Gaggia.
Luna returns skilfully carrying two cappuccinos and a plate, atop which sits a rather large blueberry Danish. Sol draws her chair and raises an eyebrow.
LUNA Don’t worry, I’ll share.
Apologies for switching off while we were walking; it’s been a while since I’ve last had an intense conversation on such a perplexing topic. Where were we?
SOL I believe I was waxing lyrical about flora, at which point you became slightly disconcerted.
LUNA It wasn’t the metaphor that bothered me, only the way you said it. It was idealistic but accurate, and there are some truths that I’d rather not confront.
Thinking about it whilst we were walking, I actually quite like your metaphor. Extending it further, if we’re in the business of planting seeds, the topic becomes the growth of love. To borrow from your imagery, one can’t just cast a seed and expect it spring up, it needs time and the right conditions.
SOL Curious. We appreciate the importance of the right conditions, but often ignore the role of adverse conditions.
LUNA In what sense?
SOL Adversity could mean fights, shocks, external threats, anything that potentially undermines love really. It was explained to me using the immune system as an allegory.
Introduce a virus to the body and one of two things will happen. A weak immune system will succumb to the virus. A strong immune system will fight and emerge stronger. Introduce a shock to love, the story is the same. Weak love will surrender. Strong love will prevail. How you feel about a person in the days after an argument should give you a fairly good idea of the strength of the bond between you.
LUNA I see what you’re saying, the power to resist damaging forces and shocks being a litmus test for a relationship, but through adversity isn’t the model way love should grow.
Generally speaking, love grows or becomes stronger in two distinct ways. The first, which you alluded to, is cyclic growth whereby resolving or ‘moving through’ conflicts results in a stronger bond being forged. A similar biological process, known as microtrauma is the basis of Hypertrophy or muscle growth. When placed under stress, strands of muscle fibre tear, which the body then replaces, overcompensating with additional muscle tissue to prevent recurrence of damage.
When people refer to the proverbial rollercoaster, that’s cyclic growth. Ideally, love’s growth should be non-cyclic, occurring as two individuals become more involved, their connection becoming deeper.
SOL From experience, I’m familiar with the ‘creative destruction’ of cyclic growth, but admittedly I’m intrigued by your ‘non-cyclic’ growth.
When you describe a deepening connection, how do you demonstrate it? Is it the two personalities becoming more entwined? Is it the sharing of experiences? Is it simply through interaction? If a deepening connection is growth, what feeds it?
Their conversation is interrupted by a loud ringtone from the adjacent table. A metallic rendition of Empire of The Sun’s Walking on a Dream issues from the phone’s small speaker.
“Is it real now? Two people become one”
“I can feel it, two people become one”
One of the young bohemians smiles, grabs her still ringing handset, and scurries toward an empty corner.
Luna lowers her voice.
LUNA I’ll stake you the bill it’s the latest crush.
SOL Won’t make any difference, I was going to pay anyway.
LUNA Ha.
Two become one. Well that definitely isn’t the answer to your question. I don’t believe the whole entwining mantra. Lyrical sounding, but surely among the most common and dangerous fallacies applied to love. Love is not a fusing of identities. In fact, deductive reversal of this logic implies that a love dissolved results in two half-people.
I can’t think of many things more painful, from an observational perspective, than couples who conduct themselves as a single entity. Living in each other’s pockets, so to speak, gives rise to considerable problems. Without adequately autonomous lives outside the relationship, which include hobbies, pursuits, friends, and without sufficient time apart, staleness develops.
I wouldn’t have eaten that Danish if it were stale.
Which leads me to your question of what feeds love: interaction, shared experience, getting to know one another better, pursuit of shared goals – they’re the obvious. It is the obscure which interests me. So long as we’re feeding love, its regime should have some variety, and this is the Achilles’ heel of enmeshed couples: lack of differential experience.
If you believe as I do that part of a relationship’s energy comes from differential experience, then the capacity to learn from each other through sharing diminishes the more the circles of experience overlap. Imagine a relationship with a co-worker who had a job role identical to your own, sat next to you, attended all the same meetings, and worked on the same projects: monotony would be an understatement.
Differential experience can be derived in two ways: actual distinct experience, for example the clients encountered by a waitress versus a criminal lawyer, and distinct interpretations of the same experience; for example two people on the same rollercoaster, one may feel exhilaration, the other fear. In a concentric relationship, the latter may still provide some fuel, but it is the element of separation in pastimes that creates energy by ensuring there is always something new to share or discuss.
Luna glances wistfully toward the display counter.
LUNA Well it looks like you’ve covered the diet side of things covered with experience. Experience provides sustenance for growth, although there’s more to it. If experience is a food, then expression is an exercise. After all, we want love to grow, but also to maintain strength. Hold that thought.
Before Luna can excuse herself, Sol darts from the table.
He returns a minute later with a fudge brownie.
SOL I hope I intuited correctly. You were craving chocolate, right?
LUNA You’re scary.
Luna continues her discourse between mouthfuls.
LUNA Of my many grievances with moral decay into something of a materialistic wasteland is the mutilation of expression. Since when was there a correlation between the expression of love and the size of a diamond, the frequency of outings, and degree of risqué hazarded making out in public? What constitutes an expression of love?
Sol pauses for effect.
SOL There are expressions and then there are indicators. Indicators are physical manifestations of lust, which betray interest. Expressions carry a much deeper meaning. Often the gestures are the same, except they elicit heightened sensory sensation – visual, auditory, olfactory, kinaesthetic impacts on an elevated, almost mesmerising level.
To converse in a noisy café and feel like you’re the only two people in the room?
He fixes an intense gaze upon her.
SOL Looking so deeply into someone’s eyes that you are in the moment, out of focus?
He accosts her hand.
SOL Holding hands and feeling as if the connection is more than one of flesh?
He stands, leaning across the table toward her, their faces almost touch.
SOL A whisper in your ear that sends shivers down your spine?
He sits back down.
LUNA To be honest, you sound like a bleeding heart.
SOL We have intellectualised and sacrificed so much to appearances, surrendering those expressions which move. Frozen hearts don’t bleed, I’m just an animal looking for a home.
Frame VII: Love’s Inherent Uncertainty
LUNA That’s a nice thought, but you know better. Animals find homes. People inhabit and then move on to greener pastures. It is our nature.
Realising the plaintiveness of his remark, and knowing she’s caught him out, he doesn’t seek to defend himself.
SOL Apologies, that was careless of me. You’re right, we are maximising creatures. Our entire way of life responds to a maximisation problem. We work to maximise our living standards. We socialise to maximise the amount of external energy we receive. We seek maximum efficiency, longevity, quality, power, satisfaction. Insofar as the two states of contentedness and desire are concerned, the former is elusive, and the latter is boundless. As long as we want after something more, we are never truly content.
Love is no stranger to the maximisation dilemma. The question “could there be something more out there?” is a salient one. If happiness hinges on being ‘content,’ and love is a core pursuit in life, it stands to reason that being in a state of uncertain love inevitably precludes fulfilment. The niggling question of ‘what if’ is an especially pervasive issue with love. Ignorance overcomes this to a large degree, because the ‘what if’ isn’t posed and present reality is not questioned. Some people will spend the rest of their lives with the first person they date.
There is an inverse correlation between experiential breadth and ‘what if’ dystonic. Logically, if you are presented with a tasting plate of everything on a restaurant’s menu before making a selection, you’re never going to leave with the feeling you could’ve ordered better.
LUNA I’d hesitate in practically applying that analogy to love, because one wouldn’t live long enough to go on a million dates. In any case, we’re dealing with a different kettle of fish: we don’t need the absolute certainty that comes from trying all the dishes; rather, we just need enough – enough to identify and understand what we want and what we don’t. Each incremental ‘date’ or interaction with a different potential partner confers higher understanding of love, and reduces the ‘what if’ issue. It isn’t possible to eliminate it completely, but you eventually arrive at a critical point where you’re satisfied.
As with most spheres of human endeavour, such repetitive action adheres to the Learning Attenuation Hypothesis, or the law of diminishing marginal experience. Let’s assume 1024 is the magic number of points you need to perfectly understand love. Learning attenuation goes something like this: you gain 512 points from your first relationship, 256 from your second, 128 from your third, and so on. With each additional or successive relationship, you gain experience, but the amount diminishes. An imperative feature of this model is that reaching 1024 (perfect understanding) is statistically impossible. After ten relationships, you will be at 99.9% (1023/1024), yet irrespective of how many relationships you have, you’ll never quite get there. The other aspect is the number of points you need to have to quash ‘what if.’ You might only need 700 points, in which case you’ll know love after your second relationship. Someone else may require 1,000 – the threshold will vary for each individual.
Sol casts his eyes downward, momentarily crestfallen, before abruptly turning toward Luna, enlivened with audacity, as a wry grin spreads across his face.
SOL How is it that you always manage to find a way to sterilise perfectly good allegories with mathematics? You’re such a geek – but I won’t oppose your Learning Attenuation Hypothesis, because by that measure, with over a thousand points, I must surely be winning.
Positioning to leave, her countenance darkens, placing a distance between them.
LUNA Asshat– we’re supposed to be having an intellectual discussion. Stop being so immature and grow up.
Taken aback, Sol opens his mouth in defence, but is besieged for words. Unable to maintain a straight face, she bursts into laughter and playfully nudges him.
LUNA I really had you going there.
A wry grin betrays his defeat.
SOL Cheap shot.
LUNA Cheap…
… Sometimes I feel we’ve made love cheap.
~
Frame VIII: The Valuation of Love
Heavy with the weight of reflection, a minute’s silence passes before it is broken by five peals of a bell resonating from a Cathedral nearby. She hesitates before speaking.
LUNA I’m sorry, I don’t know where that came from.
SOL Whyever for? You’re right, we have made it cheap, although we probably feel so for different reasons. Care to expound on yours?
LUNA For me, it is the way people throw the term around; their willingness to ascribe or employ the ubiquitous L word where it does not belong. Further, the degree of delusion when it comes to love is enormous. If I had a dollar for every clueless couple I’ve seen who’ve purported to be madly in love without appreciating the half of what love entails, I would be sipping a Paraiso in Bora Bora right now.
SOL I think you’re being too clinical about it Luna, whilst we can agree on love being evasive, there is no neat little formula that can explain it. Who’s to say you need a PhD in Philosophy in order to attain love?
LUNA Clinical? Are you trying to patronise me?
I know there’s no formula and that people impose different standards on love. For some, the object of love is simply something they like; for others, the object must necessarily capture their soul. I am not seeking to deny the massive variability in quantum and requirement. What I am alluding to is the fact there is a higher degree of love, the understanding of which appears lost on most people.
If you believe Dr. Eric Berne, we are all supposedly engaged in a perpetual struggle for enveloping physical intimacy, and in lieu of its attainment, compromise by substituting other pillars of psychological support that are often linked to recognition and social intercourse.
When I say ‘cheapened,’ it goes much deeper than just what we choose to slap the ‘love’ label on. It goes right down to the core of what unadulterated love is. Either people have forgotten the meaning, or else become so lazy as to accept a contemptible substitute. I am referring here to settling for less and erroneous substitution; the mechanisms by which love has been devalued.
Love is an inexorable need, and where anxiety exists over such a need being unfulfilled, we have three options. We can either continue pursuing it, redoubling our efforts until we get what we want, we can reduce our standards and expectations, or, we can engage in substitution.
You’d agree that among the more critical considerations with regard to life itself is the sheer amount of energy focussed, directly or indirectly, toward the attainment of ‘love’ in some form. Look around you: a cursory glance reveals an overwhelming tendency to substitute ‘love from the world,’ which may take the form of fame, attention, and recognition, for the ‘true’ love characterised by broadly commensurate exchange of energy. Energy which carries higher charge than energy issuing from anything lesser: the only kind strong enough to stop your heart.
Suddenly self-conscious of nearing the threshold of becoming emotional, she restrains herself.
LUNA ‘True’ love and ‘enveloping physical intimacy’ are soubriquets for unadulterated love, which is not magnificently definable, but at the very least has no artificial surrogate, is devoid from contaminations of deception, and utilises one’s full affective capacity.
Her turmoil is perceptible to Sol, yet despite the temptation to capitalise on it, he acquiesces. His next card continues the detached suit being played.
SOL Therein lies the hook. We can inductively reason the centrality of finding untainted love is premised on living in a tainted world. Love has value because it is a genuine among counterfeits, a truth among lies, and a whole among remnants.
Frame IX: Impediments and Illusions
SOL Absolutely, unadulterated love is fundamental. We have an innate need to feel we’ve found it. But its realisation is challenging because we often sabotage it.
The first way we sabotage, as you mentioned, is through skewing understanding. When something doesn’t fit, we try to make it fit. When we don’t feel unadulterated love, we delude ourselves that we do.
Such confusion on a large scale primes the trap of argumentum ad populum or bandwagon fallacy that contends something is validated a truth because it is believed by the vast majority.
This is precisely why scores of pollutants contaminate the contemporary understanding of love. We attach to love delusional social proofs. Romanticised notions of love which bombard us daily are not realistic and exacerbate the already pervasive unawareness.
Behaviour, the second sabotage, follows directly from the first. If the understanding is incorrect, any actions based on that understanding will also be incorrect.
Which brings us back on topic. Absurd though it may seem for a humble taxi driver, I have read Berne, but found his analysis focuses too narrowly upon psychological game theory itself. Relevant to our discussion no doubt, except that a link is missing. Evidently the romantic relationship is an auditorium in which games, particularly those involving power and manipulation, resonate most vociferously.
It would seem what we’re dealing with here is the mutual exclusivity of love and power.
“Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.”
Jung’s platitude is the missing link yielding vital implications for romantic love. Insofar as they are viewed as opposing forces, power and love are inversely correlated. This is precisely why ‘games’ are an impediment to unadulterated love; because games work on perceived and actual differentials in power that follow from manipulation.
The two most common power differentials are sexual in favour of the female, and emotional in favour of the male. Where a relationship is established and one partner seeks to manipulate the other, there is a power differential.
It is idealistic to set the bar so high, but unadulterated love, in the absolute sense, is characterised by a zero power differential in perpetuity. Humanity, for its instability and imperfection, may subscribe to a less strenuous standard: a power differential which oscillates between the two individuals such that it is roughly equal in the long run. Where it is consistently in favour of one individual, the relationship is not one of love, but of appropriation.
Unless the ‘games’ such as flirting, evasion and the like, are fully understood by both participants and acknowledged for what they are, then they are obstructive. Game theory, strictly defined, implies there must be a winner and a loser. Love is (or rather should be) an equilibrium concept where both parties win. Therefore games and love are diametrically opposed.
The storm clouds have painted the sky outside a sinister shade of gunmetal. Dressed in black, a petite waitress with a short bob of auburn hair traverses the café, stopping to illuminate the tea-light candles which sit atop each table. Sol winks at her, she blushes a subtly embarrassed shade of rose, and pretends not to have noticed.
LUNA Could you be any more insufferable?
SOL What? Things were getting too serious, I needed to break the spell.
LUNA I’m going to put you under a spell if you don’t start being a bit more decorous.
Come to think of it, there’s something to be said for spells and sabotage. Gaming and manipulation are apprentice’s enchantments. Their powerful iterations of obsession and possession are the hexes of hazard.
These two inflict a great deal of damage, though it seldom appears so at the time. Oftentimes post-relationship dynamic is telling of whether what existed prior to the dissolution was in fact love. In the cases of obsession and possession, better clarity comes retrospectively, after the sabotage has occurred.
For example, conveyance of emotional energy in context of love draws a line in the sand between devotion and obsession. The difference between devotion and obsession is most clear post mortem, evidenced by the absence or presence of toxicity. Whilst fractured devotion will often be followed to acceptance rather than resentment, obsessive love will most always result in spiteful feeling or conduct by one or both parties following a dissolution or breakup.
In the moment, devotion is characterised by loyalty and constancy, whereas obsession is asphyxiating and envious. Such envy, along with insecurity, is also a defining trait of possessive love. From what I’ve seen, possessive relationships frequently involve the male exercising emotional property rights over the female, equivalent to assuming ownership.
SOL Whoa – hold on Germaine, do my ears deceive me? Is that a feminism bias I sense? Do you have any idea how many guys I know who are whipped better than spray-can cream?
Overhearing Sol’s quip, the man in the driver’s cap grins knowingly from behind his book. The outlandish metaphor causes Luna to involuntarily visualise a domestically subservient husband and completely lose her train of thought. She shakes her head and takes some moments to find it again.
LUNA Whichever foot the shoe is on, the fact remains: a person is not a material possession. Emotional possession has no more a place in modern society than slavery. Though some may argue two parents ‘own’ a child up to some arbitrary age; in this relationship, the parents are not owners, they are custodians. Love is liberating, ownership takes captive.
SOL Insightful observation. We’ve conversed at length, but the ultimate question demands lucidity.
Is love an illusion, and if not, what makes it real?
Frame X: A Treatise on Love
They sit in silence for several minutes. The calm is shattered by an explosion of violent eloquence.
LUNA If love is an illusion, this reality is hollow, we might as well be automatons. What makes love between two people real is when they do not hold it to any definition or standard other than their own, and where that mutual understanding is in accord with a deep connection, based on more than appearances and worldly considerations; when it cannot be severed by sharp edges of adversity, undermined by attempts to sabotage, nor corrupted by influence of society; when it endures by the focussed will of the two partners alone, not for convenience, manipulation, appearances, nor drudgery. That is what makes love real.
Love does not keep secrets, no matter how painful the truth
Love is obliging; it does not belong with competitive games
Love follows no choreography, it makes itself up as it goes along
Love is the energy of chaos, harnessed fruitfully
Love sees with the vividness of the entire spectrum, never in monotone
Love is not a means to any other end, it is the end
Engrossed, they have yet to realise the café is now empty.
They are the only people there.
~
Afterword
My single largest obstacle in writing this entry was the vicious nature of enquiry yielding more questions than it answered. Each person with whom I engaged the topic presented different angles and experiences which both refined and reduced my understanding simultaneously. It has consumed the better part of three months, colliding against the inadequacy of my understanding, and trying in vain to find an alternative route. Of course, all attempts were preordained futile given my topic affords reason no sympathy.
Love will forever be subject to the context in which it exists. Normative judgements, as reflected in this dialogue are the only assertions one can make in a desert whose aridity desiccates objectivity.
The working brief I imposed on this entry was to render the most abstract of phenomena into something that marginally resembled a coherent framework. Clearly I have failed abysmally.
True to love’s form, with each degree of clarity I gain, each time my focus of sight sharpens, my vision becomes that much more a blur. Climbing a mountain and every time I perceive its peak, another wall of stone rises. It is everything and it is nothing. Everything if and when I find it, and when I choose to acknowledge it. Nothing when I can convince myself it doesn’t matter.
In preceding years, I have been fortunate enough to cross paths with people who have shared insights, challenged my perceptions and taught me. In this regard I would like to convey gratitude to those who have lent their essence to my understanding. Pia, Abbigail, April, Sera, Karen, Clare, Nicole, Johanna, Emelye, Bethany, Stephanie, Maya, Jane, Kaye, Nina, Dixie, Alexandra, Elena, Elizabeth, Genevieve, Sophie, Alicia, Nina, Pip, Ellen, and Tamara.
An entry of this nature can only be issued from a quill drawn with poison. I am blessed and haunted by such an inkwell. A state of idyllic love should preclude and incapacitate such diagnostic analysis. I cast aside my pen unconcerned by whatever judgement may befall me for these words. I am unashamedly a hunter of knowledge and accept with the eternal pursuit all its occupational hazards. Projection, however ill-informed or biased it may be, is a necessary implement which I have at my disposal and will use without diplomacy, indiscriminately, wherever it works toward my ends.
It isn’t so much the answer that concerns me, as not posing the question.
Paul Xavier Waterstone, July 13 2009
