What Is Love

2023-04-24 · essays, philosophy

Perhaps within a love ballad blasting through some grocery store speakers, a pulsing nostalgia emerges from your mind, reminding you of what was once our song. Maybe in a third-grade classroom, static against the juvenile noise that has erupted from the recess bell, you see it in a red-haired girl, your first crush - the exact crush that will soon become the object of your terrifying hormonal transformation into adulthood. It's possible that you've even felt at numerous times a gliding and liberating feeling as upon attempting to remember one singular romantic venture, you instead squint at a dizzying blur of infinite lovers, reminders of your commitment phobia. You now feel empty.

Perhaps you've only felt at once with the force of a million tsunamis, how powerful as it rose to its incredible heights and how destructive or its results as it so suddenly collapsed. For years, you feel unwilling to try again for fear of its painful return, or even worse, you had felt at once with equal strength only to realize day by day that you have made a tremendous mistake - that your commitment had developed under false pretenses, or possibly that the one you had once fallen for is no longer the same. "I'm like a tsunami," this wave erodes the shoreline, and it's lethal yet slow-motion.

Maybe you traveled to another country and found it within the embrace of an absolute stranger, creating for yourself a passionate familiarity in another world, only to be forced to abandon them for the vague excuse that simply life got in the way. Maybe at some point, you'd begun to feel it, and yet in the final hour, despite all of the signs of a promising future coming to fruition, it was ripped away in a harsh and sudden moment of rejection.

Maybe you have never felt it and now assumed that you never will - you look upon the world with an absolute bitterness, certain that the Hallmark card image of romance is nothing more than a cruel illusion to propagate an economic behavioral strategy we adorably have decided to call love.

The question posed by Haddaway is followed by the line "baby don't hurt me no more" as Haddaway explains, "People always ask me about what I meant. I meant that 'what is love' needs to be defined by everyone by his own definition. It's unique and individual. For me, it has to do with trust, honesty, and dedication." There is something incredibly true about this statement. From a human perspective, love appears to escape definition or ceding the most technical of writers to take on a more poetic approach. We're dealing with the subject each of us struggles to understand, and yet for the most part, can recognize it with absolute certainty.

Lacan does a good job of describing its incomprehensible nature. Imagine you see in front of you a beautiful flower or a ripe fruit. You reach out your hand to grab it, but at the moment you do, the flower or the fruit bursts into flames. In its place, you see another hand appear, reaching back towards your own. However, in the age of information and science, love has been reduced. For many, love is neurochemical, defined by a series of compounds interacting with the brain, with testosterone and estrogen pushing along the process, norepinephrine and dopamine reinforce it, releasing a love cocktail only at the precise moment when certain conditions have been met - at least according to anthropologist Helen Fisher from Rutgers University.

If love can be simply defined by these processes, what then can we do in order to find our perfect partner? What are these perfect conditions?

For many geneticists and determinists, our DNA has already formed the deciding criteria, and any romantic choice we make, we like someone and are condemned to do so. This could explain why we so suddenly fall for someone and not for others – a process based upon the Darwinian logic that we love simply in order to reproduce healthy offspring and continue the species. However, if we follow this train of thought, why then has society romanticized romance? Why haven't we taken the form of two horny squirrels in a park stripping all customs of love – its animal nakedness?

Simone de Beauvoir writes that authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms, where both partners tenderly respect each other's freedom. Each lover would then experience himself as himself and as the other, neither would abdicate his transcendence. They would not mutilate themselves together, but both reveal values and ends in the world.

However, falling in love is not the light, effortless process that exists in every chick flick and housewife romance. We have tried to simplify it, reduce it to an algorithm or a science, but it continues to cause messes in our personal lives, consume our daily thoughts, and shape our society. No matter how hard we try, the fall is seemingly unavoidable. The heartbroken figure, no matter how many drunken nights they spend confessing their pledge to chastity and loneliness, will inevitably fall again and again.

Perhaps falling in love is one of the true markers of our humanity - our simultaneous enslavement to primal urges and our transcendental self forever seeking further meaning to existence, all bound to the form of a beautiful other. If one is interested in experiencing life to its most colorful and deep offerings, then one ought to love endlessly and, although difficult, find a balance between romantic naivety and lonely cynicism.

As CS Lewis puts it, there is no safe investment to love. It all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and in your heart, it will certainly be rung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements, lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

The alternative to tragedy or, at least, to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell.