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What is love?!
I want to thank you for the opportunity to share my efforts
at grappling with this big question.
I thought about polling you on some questions, but I
realized they were probably rhetorical, so I won’t ask for a show of hands.
Have you ever believed you loved someone?
Have you ever stopped loving someone, after you thought you
did?
Have you ever felt you loved your parents… or your children?
Have you ever ever felt you loved
a sports team, a movie,
someone you’ve never met,
an inanimate object…
A car… Shoes… … chocolate?!
What an amazing, versatile word, or concept or emotion it
is!
Could it really apply in all those situations?
Is love a behavior? …feeling?…an
energy
Could there be some sort of unified field theory of love;
can love, like quantum light, be more than one thing at
once?… both a particle and a wave?
Ortega y Gasset said : “no land in
human topography is less explored than love.”
On the other hand, an
internet search on the word “love” gets 59,000,000 hits on Yahoo.
Welwood says:
“Now that most of the old rules for
relationship no longer apply, starting from “I Don’t Know” is the essential
first step
on our own path of discovering what
genuine
intimacy, love and communication involve.
That seems like a good place to start.
When I was in college, I was trained in the reductionist psychology of
behaviorism, which seemed intent on
understanding all of human behavior in a mechanical context of instinct and stimulus response
learning.
One evening I undertook a sort of thought experiment,
trying to see if there was anything about myself
that couldn’t be explained in the mechanical functioning
of a highly sophisticated robot.
One by one, as I examined my behavior and emotions,
it seemed I could fit everything into that model.
I could even see that the strong feelings for my girlfriend
had a lot to do with hormones and
instinct to perpetuate the species. It
was chilling.
But then I felt overcome by belief that there was one thing
that defied that mechanistic explanation:
my love for this girl …who would eventually become my wife.
And when our first child was born,
it seemed clear
that his very life was a physical manifestation of that love.
I continue to be fascinated by that theme,
questioning what it really means to be human.
Of course, my favorite character in Star Trek: The Next Generation was
Data, the android.
In one of my favorite episodes, we see him create his offspring,
manifested as a teenage girl.
Despite his exceptional manifestations of
caretaking, loyalty, concern, protectiveness…
all the attributes of a good parent,
he acknowledges that he cannot feel love for her.
In another favorite, a judge rules on whether Data has something akin to
human rights, or is simply a piece of equipment, or property.
One piece of evidence, that he had been “intimate” with a past crew
member for whom he seemed to maintain a sentimental attachment, was
inconclusive.
In the end, the judge defines the essential question as,
“Does he have a soul?”, and allows he has as much right to explore the
uncertainty of that question as any of us.
Ironically, the actress who played the
judge, Amanda McBroom, was the author
of this song that attempts to answer to today’s question:
THE ROSE
Some say love it is a
river, That drowns the tender reed
Some say love it is a
razor, That leaves your soul to bleed
Some say love it is a
hunger, An endless aching need
I say love it is a
flower, And you it's only seed.
Let’s see if we can learn anything by examining love through
the lens of History
The ancient Greeks didn’t seek any
unified theory.
They were content to recognize 3
different concepts of love.
Agape, was what Joseph Campbell defined as–
“the sublimating spirit, the mind and
the community of man”,
or a sort of spiritual love of all
humanity.
Eros was
“the spontaneity of nature, the mutual incitement of the phallus and the womb”,
or sexual love
Philia has been described as “brotherly love”.
Agape’s love of “all humanity” was
limited in that it did not necessarily include outsiders.
Originating in a sort of anti-war
sentiment preceding the golden age of
Pericles,
There was a new willingness to accept
people from other states or regions as also human, like us.
The resulting relationship with former enemies was called philia,
care and love of the other as “friend”
The Romans added the Latin word
“caritas”…
extension of care and kindness and a
commitment to the welfare of those who are ‘not kin’.
Aristotle though the highest form of
love was
the attachment that exists between
friends…
The concept of Amor, (or Minne
in German)
arose in the 11th
century.
The Doctrine of Courtly love, inspired
by Sufi’s,
was developed by poets and troubadours
in the courts of nobility [who I picture as the Michael Boltons of their day]
in the south of France.
It follows the lead and allure of the
senses… in particular sight….
It is the belief that love cannot
exert its powers between two people who are married to each other.
Lovers give each other everything
freely,
under no compulsion or necessity,
but married people are in duty bound
to give in to each other’s desires.
The purest romantic love was never
sexually consummated.
Before the industrial Revolution,
marriage always existed within a
network of wider social supports…
Marriage was an alliance of families, not individuals. ..
No traditional society ever considered
individuals’ spontaneous feelings of
love
to be a valid basis for enduring
relationships between men and women …
Not until the 19th century
Victorians
did a society envision marriage based
on romantic ideals.
What is different today is the
widespread expectation that
[marriage] should provide personal
happiness, peace and contentment.
Measuring love purely in terms of
feeling good
leaves us unequipped to handle its
hard, painful or demanding aspects.
… Isn’t this the place where people traditionally look for meaning?
In one of the earliest Greek
myths, Aristophanes writes:
“in the beginning Chaos gave birth to
Night and
Erebus, the unfathomable depth where
death dwells.
Then, “…black-winged Night/
Into the bosom of Erebus dark and
deep/
Laid a wind-born egg, and as the
seasons rolled/
Forth sprang Love, the longed-for,
shining, with wings of gold.”
Edith Hamilton writes:
”From darkness and from death Love was
born,
and with its birth, order and beauty
began
to banish blind confusion.
Love created Light … “
So love brings order from chaos,
the antidote to entropy!
Maybe my quantum, unified field ideas aren’t so far off after all!
In the myth of Cupid & Psyche…
Psyche is a beautiful woman who arouse
the jealousy of Venus.
She sent her son, Cupid to make her
fall in love
with the most vile creature in the
world.
But she was so beautiful, even he fell
in love.
He took her for himself,
but insisted she could only be with
him in total darkness,
so she wouldn’t know who her lover
was.
But, incited by her sisters,
she snuck in to see him at night,
afraid he must be some sort of
monster.
He turned out to be not so bad after
all,
but she spilled hot oil on him and he
awoke.
That ended that.
But a happy ending was worked out by
turning her into a goddess. This
anticipates the work of Carl Jung, who we will discuss later.
In the
Christian bible, it is written,
“Love is
patient, love is kind.
It does
not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It is not
rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of
wrongs.
Love does
not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
It always
protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never
fails.
In the story of Tristan and Isolde,
Gottfried von Strassburg, writes in 1210:
“I pity love with all my heart;
for though almost all today hold and
cleave to her,
no one concedes to her her due.
We all want our pleasure of her, and
to consort with her.
But no!
Love is not what we, with our deceptions,
are now making of her for each other.
We are going at things the wrong way.
..
All that we possess of her is the
word,
the name alone remains to us;
and that, too, we have so bandied about, misused and vulgarized,
that the poor thing is ashamed of her name,
disgusted with the very sound of
it.
In the Sufi tradition, Rumi wrote:
Lovers don’t finally meet
somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.”
And
Ibn al-Arabi writes:
“It is God who in each loved one
manifests himself to the gaze of each lover…
Thus it goes for love;
a creature really loves no one but his
Creator.
Haule writes, “The romantic love that
results from Cathar and Sufi currents, therefore, is a powerful expression of
the human spirit.
It is an ennobling bond between two
human souls
who are separated by physical, moral
and social constraints….”
More recently A Course in Miracles
asserts,
“The course does not aim at teaching
the meaning of love,
for that is beyond what can be
taught…
the opposite of love is fear,
but what is all-encompassing can have
no opposite.”
And “You are only love,
but when you deny this,
you make what you are
something you must learn to remember.
The anthropologist Ashley Montagu [writes]
‘It has, I believe, universally been
acknowledged
that the mother-infant relationship
perhaps more than any other
defines the very essence of love…
love is the relationship between
persons
which contributes to the welfare and
development of each.
Dan Siegel assserts:
“We’ve survived as a species
not so much because of our physical
brawn,
but due to our interpersonal capacity.
More and more, we’re realizing
that evolution has designed our brains
to be shaped by our interpersonal
environment.
So Evolution favors
someone who can
Love, attach to, and
care for a baby.
Psychology, biology and
neurobiology seem to agree
on the fundamental
importance of attachment,
the process of
connecting an infant to its caregivers.
Attachment is described as
“a tie that binds individuals together over time and space.”
Harlow’s experiments indicate
infant monkeys have a survival need
for what might be called attachment or
love
even greater than for food.
So love might be described as
evolution’s way of making us a social species.
Science tells us that
during the attraction phase of a
relationship,
the brain releases dopamine and norepinephrine…
the brain increases its production of
endorphins and enkephalins, natural
narcotics,
enhancing a person’s sense of security
and comfort.
Dr. Michael Liebowitz… even suggests
that
the mystical experience of oneness
that lovers undergo
may be caused by an increase in the
production of
the neurotransmitter serotonin.
: “When the dopamines, norepinephrines
and especially the phenylethylamines
become chemically neutralized
after a year or two of being
metabolized,
like any drug, the natural high of
romantic love falls away.
To Freud...
’love was really “aim-inhibited
sexuality”.
All is sex (libido) or
aggression (death instinct or
thanatos)
However, I prefer to
define libido more broadly as
“life force”, going
beyond sexuality.
Carl Jung laments:
I falter before the task of
finding the language to express the
incalculable paradoxes of love. Here is
the greatest and the smallest,
the remotest and nearest, the highest
and lowest,
and we cannot discuss one side of it
without also discussing the
other.
Whatever one can say, no words express
the whole.
But Jung hypothesizes that
we project a part of our selves, the
anima or animus,
on to the other,
and become attracted to a disowned
part of the self
which we recognize in our
partner.
If we are successful, we learn to love
the other for who she is,
while taking back the projected
part.
This same animus or anima then comes
to represent
the greater spiritual self, which is
projected first
onto our concept of God or Higher
Consciousness
and then taken back in a recognition
of our own greater self.
Ian Suttie states that infants are
“born with two independent
propensities.
The one that is primary is a desire
for
the social give-and-take and
responsive relationship
that we call love…. “
Haule says: “Loneliness lies at the
very heart of love.
[ We are] drawn by the person who is
…calling us out of our aloneness.”
Nathaniel Brandon defines,
“Love is, in the most general sense,
our emotional response to that which
we value highly.
As such, it is
the experience of joy in the existence
of the loved object,
joy in proximity, and joy in interaction or involvement.
…. Love represents a disposition to experience
the loved being as the embodiment of
profoundly important personal values
---and, as a consequence, a real or
potential source of joy.
Harville Hendrix writes
“…all words exchanged between lovers
since time began
can be reduced to four basic
sentences.
“I know we’ve just met, but somehow I
feel as though I already know you” (“recognition”);
…”even though we’ve only been seeing
each other for a short time, I can’t remember when I didn’t know you.”
(timelessness);
“When I’m with you, I no longer feel
alone; I feel whole, complete.” (reunification);
“I love you so much, I can’t live
without you” (necessity). …
He says, “Romantic love comes easily, but it is fleeting,
nature’s gift from the unconscious
to lure us on the journey to our full
potential.”
Real love is born after the death of romantic love.
As a family therapist, I
often discover that couples I work with
insist they love each
other,
but each has grown up
with a unique mix of messages from their culture, their families, their bodies,
their friends…
Chances are there are
some significant differences in their definitions of love.
Those differing
expectations are frequently at the root of their problems.
Here is a list of pithy quotes, from mostly famous people:
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a
real thing;
a confusion of the real with the ideal
never goes unpunished
Goethe
In Alice in Wonderland; Lewis Carroll
writes.
”Oh ‘tis love, ‘tis love, that makes
the world go round”
Benjamin Disraeli: We are all born for love.
It is the principle of existence and
its only end.
Thornton Wilder:
There is a land of the living and a
land of the dead
and the bridge is love,
the only survival, the only meaning.
Marilyn Gustin: How about thinking of love as
the force or capacity that is the source
of
all our feelings of
wonder, gratitude, beauty, affection,
concern, interest, enjoyment,… our “liking”.
M. Scott Peck:
“I define love thus:
The will to extend one’s self for the
purpose of
nurturing one’s own or another’s
spiritual growth../.
“Falling in love is not an act of
will…
is not an extension of one’s limits or
boundaries;
it is a partial and temporary collapse
of them…
“Genuine love, on the other hand,
implies
commitment and the exercise of
wisdom. …
Love is constant, it is we who are
fickle.
Love does guarantee, people
betray.
Love can always be trusted, people
cannot.
People marry for a variety of other
reasons, and with varying results; but to marry for love is to invite
inevitable tragedy.
James Branch Cabell
That great philosopher, Brigitte
Bardot, said
“To marry while blindly in love is
dangerous;
to marry without it may be fatal.
Alan Watts: Love is an act of
surrender to another person;
it is total abandonment.
Levines “—the boundarylessness of your own great nature [is]expressed in
its rapture and absolute vastness
by the word “love”
Welwood:The dream of love
distracts us from the real path of
love,
which continually leads into vast
unforeseen possibilities.
The reason [a relationship] often is
hard
is that we are set in our ways,
and it takes great energy and
dedication to break free of them..
Love helps us to do so, by inspiring
us to open our heart.
Germaine Greer: the hallmark of
egotistical love,
even when it masquerades as altruistic love,
is the negative answer to the
question,
‘Do I want my love to be happy
more than I want him to be with me?’
Carolyn Hax has one of the more recent
answers.
Responding in her advice column,
published last month in the
Post-Dispatch,
to a letter asking the question, “what is love” , she replied
“It is sharing yourself with someone who enjoys, accepts, honors,
supports and experiences life with you as a whole,
not as a list of selected character
items and physical traits.
It is when you return that favor,
freely and with pleasure
and without keeping score. It’s also unique, dynamic, private.
It’s not limited to romance. It’s right in front of your face
in more forms than you can count, which is why if you’re looking
for something specific, I highly doubt you’ll see it.”
From Rilke:
For one human being to love another
human being:
that is perhaps the most difficult
task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and
proof,
the work for which all other work is
mere preparation.
Loving does not at first mean
merging, surrendering and uniting with
another person
—it is a high inducement for the
individual to ripen,
to become something in himself,
to become world, to become world in
himself for the sake of another; it is a great, demanding claim on him,
something that chooses him and calls
him to vast distances.
Emily Dickinson: That Love
is all there is,
Is all we know of
Love
Vincent van Gogh:
There is the same difference in a
person
before and after he is in love,
as there is in an unlighted lamp and
one that is burning.
The lamp was there and was a good
lamp,
but now it is shedding light, too
(and this is its real function)
Kahlil Gibran:
Let [love] be a moving sea between the
shores of your souls.
DH Lawrence: Love is a relationship
between things that live,
holding them together in a sort of
unison…
Hate is not the opposite of love.
The real opposite of love is
individuality.
The song says:
Love is a many splendored thing…
Love is nature’s way of giving a
reason to be living.
In the Wedding Song, Paul Stookey
asks:
If loving is the answer, then who’s
the giving for?
Do you believe in something that
you’ve never seen before?
There is love…
What’s to be the reason for becoming
man and wife?
Is it love that brings you here or
love that gives you life?
John Lennon wrote,
All You Need is Love
Also
Love is real, Real is Love
Love is feeling, feeling love
Love is wanting to be loved
Love is touch , touch is love
Love is reaching , reaching
love
Love is asking to be loved
Love is you, you and me
Love is knowing we can be
Love is free, free is love
Love is living,
living love
Love is needing be loved
and
I am he as you are he as
you are me
and we are all together
Goo goo g’ joob
---Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.
---I can’t live, if living is without you.
The stories of Frankie and Johnnie, Hey Joe
As a family therapist,
I’ve worked with couples who claim to love spouses or
children they’ve treated with astonishing cruelty.
Tina Turner sang
WHATS
LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT
WHAT`S LOVE BUT A SECOND HAND EMOTION
WHAT`S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT
WHO NEEDS A HEART
WHEN A HEART CAN BE BROKEN
Marriage isn’t a process of prolonging
the life of love,
but of mummifying the corpse. P. G. Wodehouse
Sting wrote in “Every breath you take”:
Since you've gone I've been lost without a trace;
I dream at night, I can only see your face
I look around, but it's you I can't replace;
I feel so cold, and I long for your embrace
I keep crying baby, baby please,
Oh, can't you see You belong to me?
How my poor heart aches With every step
you take
Every move you make Every vow you break
Every smile you fake, every claim you stake
I'll be watching you
Every move you make, every step you take
I'll be watching you
He intended this as a song about a stalker,
and was disturbed when he found out it had become a favorite at weddings.
So, is there a Unified Field theory of love?
I think so!
Hendrix writes:
“What it all boils down to is that
our inchoate longing for
connectedness,
and those moments when
we pierce the veil of our everyday
existence,
stem from a hazy memory that at some
time we were not separate, but connected to everything,
and particularly to all other humans,
in a way that felt safe and
supporting.
And our fundamental yearning
to transcend the barriers that now
separate us
from our awareness of this
connection.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:
Love alone is capable of uniting
living beings
in such a way as to complete and fulfill them,
for it alone takes them and joins them
by what is deepest in themselves.
In a discussion marking the
anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks,
a TV news analyst defined evil as the
disconnect from recognizing others’
humanity,
reminiscent of the pre-philia
Greek attitude.
Perhaps love then is simply
the connection to other people and
things,
or the awareness of that
connection.
Perhaps this miracle of
connection
is the essence of
ethical behavior:
to make decisions as if
you and I are one.
Could it be literally be that, as in the Greek chaos myth,
love is the same as the weak and strong nuclear forces,
the energy that binds together and
converts chaos to matter,
..an awareness of the fundamental glue of the universe?
If Thanatos, the death force of decay and entropy
is a tendency toward disorganization and disconnection,
then the libido or
life force is the connection, the opposite.
So the unified field
theory is: it's all love!
The problem with intimate
relationships may not be
that they aren’t expressions of love,
as that they arouse as much fear as
love.
Perhaps then the key to having more
love in your life is
“fear management”.
How do we face the risk that we will
“lose that lovin’ feeling?”
The fear that interferes with love may
be
the fear of death, the fear of
annihilation--thanatos.
And yet, in some mystical traditions,
that is the moment of the truest love
of all,
oneness with the universe,
annihilation of the ego represents
surrender to pure love.
So, is it the fear of the loss of
love,
or the fear of the achievement of
love?
Perhaps there really is only one
“love”,
Perhaps what differs in the apparent
different types of love
Is only the different types of fear
attached to it.
Love is colored by the spectrum of
fears…
of loss, betrayal, alienation,
isolation, disappointment, etc.
If so, my advice for having more love
in your life
would be to develop a relationship
with
the fear aroused with your love.
If you can understand the nature of
the fear that accompanies your love,
you may be able to find ways
to dissipate it, reassure it, stand up
to it, or protect yourself
in a way that is more supportive of
love.
Mythology, Edith Hamilton
Challenge of the Heart, John Welwood,
ed.
On Human Nature, Edward O. Wilson
Born for Love, Leo Buscaglia
Self and Others, N. Gregory Hamilton
The Bible, various
A Course in Miracles, foundation for
Inner Peace
The Couples Comanion, Harville Hendrix
The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran
Creative Mythology, The Masks of
God, Joseph Campbell
The Psychology of Romantic Love,
Nathaniel Brandon
The 501 Best and Worst Things Ever
Said About Marriage, Ronald B. Schwartz
Keeping the Love You Find, Harville
Hendrix
Divine Madness, John Haule
Getting the Love You Want, Harville
Hendrix
Why Religion Matters, Huston Smith
Journey of the Heart, John Welwood
Embracing
the Beloved, Stephen and Ondrea Levine