On Love
I was thinking the other night that I needed to write something about love. I’ve talked about loving my family as opposed to liking my friends; but in a discussion on love I wonder if I really understand that word and emotion.
Stephen Covey in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People defined love through the action tense of the word. Not sex. But, more specifically, that love required acts in order for it to not only survive but to build and thrive. You have to do things for the people you claim you love. I’ve found that notion very interesting, since I read the book about ten, eleven… okay thirteen years ago. And as a result of my having identified with that notion of love I think it has helped define that attitude I have been looking for my adult life.
I am reminded of (and I apologize for using this again and again) what a girl once said to me, “You know you love me.” It was a statement and it directly led me to review what it was I felt, how I felt, what I would apply to her, and then our breaking up. We’ve stayed distant friends, acquaintances really, over the years… I keep thinking I need to see if she’s had a kid yet, but the outcome is still there. She thought, regardless of subsequent statements made, that we’d reached a point in our relationship where that should be true and I was there because I found her explosively hot.
One of the things that remains, in my mind, prevalent when dealing a member of the opposite sex, who is not related to you, is whether or not you are a) going to like her, and b) whether or not you are going to like her family. You see, I am not under the misapprehension that dating and eventually marriage is merely about two people. No. Not at all. In fact, it is about two families. Can I tolerate hers? Can she tolerate mine? Many relationships have started and moved forward without both parties ever finding out if that is true. You don’t marry an individual, you marry a family.
The outcome of love, if you are extending this through a dating perspective, is marriage and children. Whether or not you agree with me on that is inconsequential, to me, because the outcome of real love is marriage and children. Marriage is between a man and a woman. Children should be a product of that marriage and that love – where possible. Before you can get to the point, and notion, of marriage you have to go through love.
Love, then, has a different background than friendship. There may not be a time commitment associated with it. Oh, don’t take that the wrong way, there is a time commitment associated with love, but it’s not like having and building friendships. You can’t sit and say, “How long have I known this person? Three years! Check. Have we hung out pretty regularly? Once a week for two and a half! Check. Is this someone I would call when something positive has happened in my life or if I am living on the other side of the world simply to chat? Done it, still do it. Check.” There are different criteria for love than for those people you think of as friends and no matter what anyone says or will say the distinctions are different.
One element to true love is time. You have to have put in time to get to the end result. There is no substitute for it. It’s like building a friendship where the rules are different. I honestly believe people when they say things like, “I fall in love at least once a week.” Granted, in the back of my mind the word “love” is transposed with “lust” but to the individual, they have found an emotion that is defined, by them, through love and they can find it at least once a week.
When dealing with family the reason love exists to fully between siblings, even battling siblings, is because you have the natural element of time and location. This builds into another element that defines love: Location. You can’t live on opposite sides of the country or opposite sides of the world and declare love for each other. Yes, it happens. But it doesn’t happen in such a way that you are talking about a true respect and opinion for and of someone else. Finding things like respect and developing a positive opinion of someone else only comes from being able to be around that person and having spent time with him/her. You can’t do that long distance. That is probably one of the biggest reasons that long distance relationships don’t work. You’ve not been bothered to actually get to know the person you are trying to woo.
Respect is something that you can’t fake. Either you have it or you don’t. There are people who will always have it for everyone they come in contact with. There are those who will never have it for the people they come in contact with. You’re better with the former than the latter. The latter is a bad relationship to be in. In a fledgling relationship the idea of respect can go a long way to actually fostering it between the individuals involved because it is a strong emotion that will lead to something far stronger in the long run. It is the desire to respect and the desire to love that builds a romance – what keeps that romance alive is actual love and actual respect that builds as the months and years go by.
You can fall in love with anyone. You can fall into the emotional trap that is passive love. Passive love is doing nothing and expecting nothing in return. It may move to the physical act of love, sex, but passive love doesn’t grow, it doesn’t mature, it doesn’t allow for real growth of an individual, it merely exists. It exists in a way that makes at least one of the individuals feel dirty. Some people take this “dirty” feeling to a whole new level and call it nice and natural. It is nice to feel bad about yourself and as a result there are people out there who will help you do it just so you can get your jollies on through feeling poorly about yourself.
True love, the kind of love that fairytales never talk about; the kind of love that movies confuse; true love isn’t something that happens overnight. It doesn’t happen at “first sight,” it doesn’t happen because you want it to. Love is an emotion that can be defined through example, but to really understand it you have to have experienced it.
The Greeks had four different words for love. Agape, Eros, Philia, and Storge. Agape is general affection or concern; Eros is passionate love (root word for erotic); Philia is virtuous love, friendship, and loyalty; and Storge is natural affection – as that between parent and child.
I am not the only one who has separated and defined out love or friendship or even relationships. There will always be differences between one kind of a relationship (e.g. friendship) and another (e.g. spouse). The separation is important when determining whether or not a form of “love” is actually playing a role in the greater experience.
Even religion separates loves. You’ve got Charity and pretty much every other kind of love bulked together. Charity, defined, is godlike love, it is love totally unfettered by anything else. You throw all of the loves together, remove any negative connotations, add a sprinkling of Godlike qualities, and you have charity. All other loves, friendship, marital, natural, passive, lust, fall into the other category. The Christian ethos is to achieve a form of Charity which also denotes a form of humility.
True love isn’t something that you find because you’ve dated someone for three weeks or three years. It is something that is developed over a long period of time. I’ve told people that one test of a relationship is how they handle the first argument and how the relationship survives. I, personally, don’t see the need to raise my voice to many people and in arguments with girls I am dating I don’t raise my voice. On top of that experience dictates that when you can see something is wrong you need to fix it. For me, the relationship is about one other person and that is the girl I am with.
I’ve said it before, and I will probably say it again and again, I don’t have the capacity to date or, really, like more than one person at a time. If I am going out with someone it doesn’t matter if she is dating other people, that we’re not exclusive, because I am only going out with her. In a disagreement (and trust me, I naturally cause a lot of those) the only thing that matters, to me, is to resolve it. Where we’re going, what we’re doing, what is going on around us takes a backseat to the relationship.
I guess, what I am wondering is whether or not I have experienced love outside of the realm of family. Familial love is different from the Eros of the Greeks. You don’t look at your siblings and say, “Mmmm. Nice!” That would be gross and in most places illegal. At the same time, you do look at people you are dating and you do say that in the hopes that the passion will come. As an LDS man (I wanted to add young and even though I look younger than I am, I don’t feel I can add that anymore) part of getting to the passionate love is working toward marriage. Sometimes I wonder if it’s not a grand conspiracy to get people to expedite people to the altar by theoretically limiting what can be done through hormonal urges before marriage. You should ignore that thought.
The point, though, is that love is not a product of first sight or a direct product of infatuous feelings that build over the course of a relationship. Nor is it a guarantee to a happy life or a happy marriage. I believe that many people that claim the right to having felt or been in love are confusing their emotions. Instead of having been in love they were in lust. Instead of having experiences love they are describing the experience and feelings left over from chemically induced euphoria. Love is a product, as Covey stated, of work. In the end, to feel real love, to feel that real passion every day about the same person, requires a long commitment, it requires a lot of time, it requires a lot of energy, and – most importantly – it requires giving of oneself over and over again, to achieve the desired objective.
Love is not a definable characteristic until you’ve lived within its throws for a long, long time. And then, all you can say is, “Talk to me after twenty years of marriage.”