Disclaimer: This is uniquely my version of what Love is and feels like. A tiny drop in the vast ocean of what Love would be for each one of us.
So the obvious question that I ask & often can’t find answers to is, “What is Love?” “Are you in Love?” I have read a bit about it & wanted to share few things that gave me a little perspective.
Aristophanes, Greek Philosopher, had explained that love is our search for our alter ego, that part of us that will make us whole again. Socrates adds something to Aristophanes’ theory that changes everything: we don’t yearn for the half or the whole unless it is good. By this he means that the motive force in love is a yearning for goodness, not just completion. From this he concludes that love is always directed towards what is good, indeed that goodness itself is the only object of love. When we love something, we are really seeking to possess the goodness which is in it. Not temporarily of course, but permanently. And from there Plato gives his first definition of love: ‘Love is desire for the perpetual possession of the good.’
Everything in this definition is interesting. First, ‘love is desire’ already articulates a fundamental presupposition that human beings have the innate desire to acquire. Our life is a continuous search for things that will satisfy and fulfil our needs that will provide happiness. Second, desiring always implies a desire to have what is good. Of course, every human being’s definition of good is different; hence while you find a guy/girl “extremely desirable”, others might find the same person completely unattractive. Indeed, it is love that makes the world go round, without it nothing could exist. But although all things love, and all men are in some sense ‘Lovers’, very few recognize the ‘object’ of their love. If I ask you why you love someone, you would usually start listing physical attributes, to behaviour, to soul connections, matching wavelengths. However, it’s unique to that individual and not a worldly rule. Which means, it isn’t necessary that I’m in love with everyone who is beautiful, but with ‘her’ I’m.
Did I confuse you? Probably I did. A good way to look at this would be is to reflect on why are you in love with someone right now.
Moving on, at the beginning of our Love search we naturally contemplate physical beauty. We fall in love with people who are beautiful & attractive. This stage is usually short-lived; usually because our desire to acquire is accomplished or because what looked attractive from distance isn’t gleaming in close quarters. Realising that physical beauty is not limited to any one beloved, we become a lover of all physical beauty. Therefore we relax the intensity of his passion for one particular person but believe in world of bountiful opportunities for acquisitions.
The next stage is when we realise that beauty of the soul is more important than body. We appreciate social and moral beauty and contemplate the beauty of institutions and noble activities. There more stages to this however moving on to the next stage purely depends on how evolved we are. Anything beyond this requires us to understand absolute beauty, and mysteries of human needs.
I’m not trying to give you a path to love, I can’t. Love is not a uniform phenomenon. There are many different kinds of relationships that we can talk about as love; the love between parent and child, the one between brothers and sisters, friendship or erotic love. In addition to this, every love, every relationship, can be said to take a different, individual or personal form. Is it not impossible, then, to say anything definite about what love is? Apparently it can be so many things. What, one may ask, makes all of these cases instances of love? Second, people often express a doubt or wonder as to how we can ever know what others mean when they are talking about love. This question often reveals the disappointments they have experienced in relation to love, and how puzzled they have felt about what other people might mean by using the word. “She says she loves me and then she goes and does such a thing!” How often have we said that?!
Yet the bigger questions we all keep trying to solve for are
- Am I in love or is this infatuation?
Romantic love equals a mixture of infatuation and attachment. Infatuation is that heady feeling you experience when you’re in the throes of a crush. The attachment piece refers to the desire to bond with another creature, whether it’s a romantic partner, a favourite pet, or your favourite relative. You can be high on infatuation and low on attachment with regard to another person, because the two qualities are independent of one another. Infatuation may bring with it those strong pleasurable feelings, as I noted earlier, or it can be plagued with anguish, anxiety, distress, and misery. Because of this, I believe that infatuation provides higher arousal levels than attachment. It’s infatuation that will put you through the highs and lows as you pick the petals off the daisy wondering if he/she loves you or loves you not. When your attachment to your partner is strong, solid and secure, your emotions will remain on a more or less even keel. If you’re insecurely attached, in contrast, you may either fret constantly about whether or not your loved one will be there for you (“anxious attachment”) or dismissively push those you care about away (“avoidant attachment”). The perfect combination, is to be high on both infatuation and attachment. This is perhaps why, successful long-term marriages shows that partners who stay together still care about what their partners are doing and want to be with them. However, because the highs and lows of infatuation do tend to smooth out over time, it’s more likely that people in it for the long haul are companionate- highly attached but only moderately (if at all) infatuated.
- Why didn’t my last relationship work; we looked perfect to start with?
Some of us seek salvation in love, much as other people do in religion, hoping to find in another the perfection they cannot find in themselves. At first, they may well think that salvation is at hand. Early in a relationship, their partner may indeed seem to be just what they are looking for, and their being in love is equivalent to being saved – from the world and from themselves. But eventually disillusionment is almost certain to set in. They discover two facts. First, the other person has flaws: they cannot maintain the illusion of perfection is the face of ever more evidence that the partner is not, in fact, perfect. Second, no other human can save them, not even the love of their life. Are we willing to look beyond the flaws of our partners and also acknowledge our own shortcomings? Now most of you may say, “So, you are asking me to compromise?” Well, No. All I’m asking you to do is acknowledge that human beings in general are flawed. Adam who ate the fruit from the forbidden tree is equally responsible as was Eve who inveigled Adam to do so.
- Can I fall in love again? What if, I’m heartbroken again?
Love facilitates self-growth, expanding and diversifying who you are. As you spend more time together, the lines between you and your partner become blurred; your self-concept and partner-concept become inextricably intertwined. So it’s no surprise that when a relationship ends, people experience self-confusion and self-contraction. Your sense of self actually shrinks. You might feel lost and unsure of who you are. The remedy? Start rebuilding. Rebuilding requires redefinition. It’s time to try new things and spend time with new people. Pursue the benefits of self-concept rediscovery. I believe that we are never heartbroken; we are ‘heartbent’. Our inclination may change in the way we look at people but for a man, it is impossible to live as an island. A lot of discoveries & inventions in this world were made because of persistence. Because they never gave up.
Edison and his team of researchers tested more than 3,000 designs for bulbs before he filed a patent for an electric lamp with a carbon filament. Winston Churchill was subsequently defeated in every election for public office until he became Prime Minister at the age of 62.Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he succeeded. While most of the examples I’m talking have tangible outcome, it’s no different from Love. If you intend to find your true love, then keep exploring.
Love is not made for the faint-hearted, or those who hesitate on the side-lines. You must be tremendously brave, tremendously audacious, to throw yourself into the eye of the hurricane. You must have incredible faith in your ability to mend a broken heart to risk falling into the arms of a lover whose motivations you might never fully understand. In a deep sense, passion is meant for the resilient—for those who know that they’ll find their way back onto solid ground no matter how badly they fall. It’s meant for those who are confident that love’s disillusionments won’t ravage them beyond repair. And it’s meant for those who recognize that sometimes a massive love followed by a massive failure is more glorious than a timidly lived success.
Love in its own mysterious ways will find you; keep your arms wide open. It might help to conceive of romantic failures as love’s way of teaching us the kinds of lessons we might never otherwise learn. When it comes to love, our so-called failures are often (not always, but often) merely new opportunities for growth, new opportunities for singularizing our character. Those who understand this are more likely to welcome love’s summons because they know that the happily-ever-after is only one aspect of love – that to love is, among other things, to accept the possibility of disappointment.
Remember, the saying is not staying balanced in love, it is falling, losing yourself to love.
Fall in Love!!
sagemoveson 