On Love

I have been thinking about love lately. I have been thinking about how I love, and what I seek in love.

Love is obviously important. It was present in all of the stories I read and watched growing up. A parent’s love. A lover’s love. Comradery. Friendship. Loyalty. Compassion for small things. I have experienced hundreds of stories about love and its varieties, but I’m still hazy on the details.

What is it to love unconditionally? I hear that it is a kind of ultimate compassion. It is certainly an ideal of mine. To love this world warts and all. To love my fellow man despite himself. To love my self despite… well, anyway.

How do we talk about love? When I think about love as an action, I think about falling in love. I think about love happening to me.

Is love a choice? Forgiveness doesn’t feel like much of a choice. Can you still love someone who you haven’t forgiven? Can you love a principle you’ve betrayed?

How about the love of ideas? Aren’t ideas beautiful in a vacuum? Hovering in space like a perfect thing. But then you place it in reality, say something like egalitarianism. And suddenly it’s difficult to understand because it needs greater and greater context. Egalitarianism. For all things to be equal. Equal rights. Equal access to resources. Equal ability to choose. While facing a history full of inequality. And the splitting of hairs when it comes to these very definitions. Equality. Fairness. And peace. And even love.

We can use these words very liberally, without deeply thinking about their profound implications.

There was a book called The Sorrows of Young Werther. It was about a man who loved a woman. How she was betrothed to another man named Albert, but despite this, Young Werther stayed close to them, until he came to the conclusion that their love triangle must lose a member to become stable. So in an act of pragmatic futility, he takes his own life. Napoleon thought this text to be so valuable, he brought it with him on his march to Egypt. What is this kind of love?

There was a series called Scenes from a Marriage. It was about the unraveling of an unhappy marriage through time. I remember seeing it and feeling my heart sink into my chest. The seeds of doubt had been sewn. Is it possible to love another person unconditionally? And if not, what are the conditions of love? Is it economic? Must certain pressures be absent to foster a fertile love that can grow with time? Does economic strife salt the soil? Is love a luxury property? Troubling thoughts indeed.

Is love mental? Are we engraved with certain ideas that make meaningful love inaccessible? The American intellectual bell hooks might identify patriarchy, as the engine that grinds love for fuel. She writes of patriarchy and love quite often in her works. I find the way she writes about love to be very exciting. She argues it is essential for society to develop a universal definition of love, so that we might be better equipped to express it in our actions.

Is love real? In the case of The Sorrows of Young Werther, there was reportedly copycat suicides with men dressing up as Werther who would kill themselves with a similar pistol presumably over a similar plight. Are the stories that we learn the scaffold upon which we flesh out our individual love? Or is love constant? Can it bend with language or is it an unchangeable instinct?

With Scenes from a Marriage, the miniseries broke Sweden’s heart. Divorce rates soared and would seem to suggest that it simply takes reflection to unwind what is supposed to be the strongest of bonds. Did this show sew a seed that would not otherwise be there? Or did it reveal real patterns empowering viewers to recognize when a relationship isn’t working, and that it’s okay to find something new? And what is that new thing?

And what of queer love. This kind of outlaw love that must find and carve space to manifest. This queer love, which has survived so long through sheer resilience and the ability to fluctuate its visibility. Queer love is fantastic because it is an inherently exploratory and curious kind of love. And it tends to examine the various facets of love and disentangle it mindfully rather than leaving it frozen. We ask about the nuance between sexual attraction and mental attraction. We examine the way we entangle and attach to other souls. We seek to examine the way we hurt, and how to nurse our hearts back to bloom.

It is confusing, but so are all profound endeavors.

And what of tainted love. Love that dominates. Love that pretends. Love that changes dramatically with the change of a single condition. To see a lover’s gaze turn to a furrowed brow is such a quiet thing. And all the sugar is licked off. And the only thing left are questions of power. And when it comes to love on a large scale, love of a community, love of a nation. My, how it becomes abstract. If you have the time, you can see how a baby’s love for warmth will transition into a love of money with the mere passing of decades. What happens during these years?

What dark ships sail the vast seas under the flag of love.

And as I describe love more and more, I find myself rather tired. Very tired. Because I feel this word escaping me. I feel it being interpreted. For it is a fluid word is it not? Love. And the more generally I speak of it, the more I feel the opportunity for misinterpretation. I will refocus on myself.

I wonder what the conditions of my love are. For my love is quite conditioned. It feels like my heart is wrapped up in a complex knot. In some cases there are locks. I play at the knots gingerly. And I explore the dungeons of my interiority for the keys. I brace myself for sudden and shocking sensations. And afterward, I try to hold that moment and allow myself to be vulnerable. I don’t know if I will learn to love unconditionally at the end of this journey. But I truly believe, that I can learn how to love more meaningfully.