What is Love?

 Love is a word that has become a container for an infinite spectrum of human expression. Every artistic creation is touched or inspired by love. Love has been posited as our human capacity to surrender our selves, our vanity, our pride for the sake of another. It is “a devotion, a deep affection and also a yearning” But considering the quest for true love has become such a mainstream ambition, one that sells clothes, perfumes, and billion dollar movies the fact that it continues to elude many of us presents us with a few questions. Did our tribal ancestors have a notion of a true love, shared between two isolate people, or was it something they shared collectively? Is Love an ideological accessory to marriage, an institution which many anthropologists site as man’s first attempt to control woman. Our demand for the sanctity of love has eclipsed our belief in a god, our love of nature, along with all cultural barriers and taboos. In many ways true love stands as the beacon of our modern age, the last remaining belief amongst the realities of broken families, and immorality on every front. Although its demand has risen, its ideology hijacked and indulged by an ever growing market of products to make us more attractive, do we know what it is? Or should we accept that love is beyond reason, beyond language, beyond words, is a mystery which as death, one can never truly understand. For the poet Rilke love is something we cannot speak of because “God bears love in the world yet the world overwhelms us.

Verily the mother speaks not of love for it is born within her within the child, and the child destroys it, verily the spirit speaks not of love for the spirit thrusts it into the future and the future is remote, verily the lover speaks not of love for to the lover it comes in sorrow and sorrow sheds tears.” Romantic love is often felt and portrayed as pain. It is a blurring of identities, an insatiable attraction, a feeling of deep connection. From this stems the idea of soul mates, which according to Pablo Coelho are two souls who in previous incarnations belonged to one being. In this way love becomes part of the process of finding ourselves but it seems in finding ourselves we have to loose ourselves, to be possessed of another, and what of this self abandonment? Does this not settle into a state of confusion, of addictive dependency, euphoria, despair, and confinement. Of questioning, and the need to attach and dissolve oneself in the pure oblivion of feeling. Is it not as any drug can be an illusion that seduces one with the promise of happiness and effortless belonging. Only to be withdrawn and left with a hollowed self. The German poet Rilke also warns of this, in his indictment against the youthful follies of love, “If each loses himself for the sake of the other and looses the other and many others that wanted still to come how can they that no longer posses anything of their own selves be able to find a way out of themselves, out of the depth of their already shattered solitude's. ‘ Love in his eyes should be a “high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for his sake and for another’s sake.” And yet this can only be done alone, as two whole people standing guard “over the solitude of the other” .

This is one language of love, the reasoned view that comes with age and experience. But there is another perhaps more naive expression of love, Siri Hustvedt touches on it in one of the most moving passages in her book, “What I Loved”. Here a female character writes a letter to her lover, “I think about your thighs, and the warm moist smell of your skin, in the morning, and the tiny eye lash in each corner of your eye, that I always notice when you first roll over to look at me. I thought I would have more time to chart your body, to map its poles, its contours and terrain, I imagined a lifetime as your cartographer.” This is a love that seizes and binds us to the flesh, to its endless pleasures, to its oral feast. A condition that causes us to sentimentalise every word and image, to linger on another as though their very flesh, touch made us aware of our own skin, and caress. And yet this momentary ecstasy experienced in the early flight of love matures into a comfortable familiarity, a familiarity that can breed contempt. Particularly in the case of men, whose masculine identity cannot be seen to be overpowered by a woman. As John Gray writes in “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus” “a man automatically alternates between needing intimacy and autonomy”, whilst a woman’s love and need of it is the very essence of all that she is and aspires to be.