Developing an Understanding of Love

Nothing is harder than to write about love. We know that love exists, yet we're afraid that if we go beyond the briefest of poetic insights, we'll send it fleeing. It alludes our grasp. And yet, it beckons for our lives.

If one wishes to know love, one must live love, in action. . . . One will learn love only with fresh insight, with each new bit of knowledge, which he acts out, and which is reacted to, or his knowledge is valueless (Buscaglia, 1972, p. 91). [Italics Original]

Any discussion of love challenges us at the very core. Here we have staked our lives. Throughout the ages, people have testified to love as the largest experience in life. Yet, it is hard to recognize what we have not known. As Kieffer (1977) wrote:

One of the difficulties of developing a consistent definition of intimacy is its subjective character. . . . One can only understand aspects of intimacy to the extent that he or she has been privileged to experience them (p- 275).

Asking a person to write on love is like granting free license to explore one's own personal life. Just as marriage provides a magnifying glass for viewing the nature of social relationship, writing on love highlights one's own maladjustment. The literature on love is plagued by the fact that too often we learn more about the author's individual pathology than we do about love. As Ortega y Gasset (1957, p. 25) once commented on Stendhal's famous discourse De l'Amour (1822): "Stendal's case is pretty obvious: we are dealing with a man who never truly loved, nor, above all, was every truly loved."

Yet we must begin to write fully threatened by the fact that we might learn something. We must bridge our vulnerability, realizing that any discussion we have, given the very nature of love, will always be partial and incomplete.

It is difficult to define love. The word has been used to describe almost everything from human bondage to the Holy Spirit. We even have a variety of words and types of love: Agape, Eros, Love of God, Romantic Love, Infatuation . . . . Love seems to have almost as many faces as there are ways of meeting: there is the erotic love which sends us soaring and then reduces us to a fearful quiver awaiting a sign. There is the Christian love which defines neighbor as self. There is the romantic love of knights and their quests. And there is the bridge of married love embracing a quiet solitude based on years of familiarity and common experience.

There is also the oneness and communion with nature where all is experienced as related and at peace. There is the love of country where all is dedicated to furthering and preserving a noble cause. There is altruism which through one more good act once again seeks to make the world better.

And there are still other loves. Maternal love which is the eternal permission of the mother for the child to be. There is the paternal love of justice. And there are the fleeting moments of infatuation which afterward leave us wondering what possessed us. Indeed, we find almost everything classified as love: from God to sweethearts to ice cream.

Under the word "love," we find almost everything from the excesses of passion to the tenderness of knowledge lumped together. How do we sort through the maze of all that has been called love?

Often, we are a far cry from the majesty depicted by the poets. Some "loves" even look more like hate: couples who seem to stay together simply because they could not bear to forego the "joy" of making the other miserable. We find countless battered people living well past the

boundaries of sadism, brutalized but addicted. All for love . . . . For many it seems hard to separate love from obsession.

There are loves which seem merely recreational in nature and, there are loves which consume us whole. There is the love which is as soft as joy. And there is the love that awakens our growth and happiness.

There is the love of God and the oneness and harmony of the spirit. And there is self-love: respect and caring for our own lives. -- Out of all of this, how can we ever presume to talk of love? How do we make sense out of this diversity? How do we get lost in our own efforts to love? And how do we avoid mistaking some writer's personal pathology for an insight? For we must recognize that across all of this there is a common grain. There must be something. There must be something that all these "kinds" of love have in common: that they share.

In truth, it must be so that: ". . . there are not 'kinds' of love. Love is only of one kind. Love is love. One knows and expresses and acts out what he knows of love. He does this at each stage of growth" (Buscaglia, 1972, p. 96).

We are stranded at different way stations. Yet the heart seeks love. Divided across a disjointed existence, we cry out for meaning. What is this love that we seek? It has so many faces.

Love is both the heights and the solitude; the times we see infinity in the twinkling of any eye, and the day-to-day existence. It is the peaks the ''soul can reach, when feeling out of sight for the ends of Being and Ideal Grace." And love is also where we can relax.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth

and height

My soul can reach.

I love thee to the level of everyday's

most quiet need,

By sun and candle-light

(Browning, 1845, p. xliii).

Love is our freedom song. It is a communion of spirits. And it is a quiet relatedness. Love is trust and faith; innocence put to risk once again. "Only as a child shall you enter the kingdom of heaven." Love is play that awakens the eyes of awe and wonder looking fresh once again. It takes another chance on birth:

I love thee with the passion

put to use in my old griefs,

And with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed

to lose with my lost saints.

I love thee with the breadth, smiles,

tears, of all my life

Browning, 1845, p. xliii).

Love is also a way of knowing. Not only does one come to know the

other, but also oneself, and ultimately life. Love is an active creation of meaning based on faith. Love stands and creates. It is a saying "yes" to life. To follow the poet William

Blake (1800):

The Angel that presided o'er my birth

Said, "Little creature, form'd of Joy

and Mirth,

Go love without the help of any

Thing on Earth (p. 141).

Love cannot be proven. Or sometimes even justified. But it is a step that humans take. This will to love does not lend itself to the normal masculine, rational mode of scientific inspection of philosophical analysis. It is not something which we can readily define and categorize. As Nietzsche (1846) suspected we needed a new approach to court an understanding of love:

Supposing the truth is a woman -- what then? Are there not grounds or the suspicion that all philosophers . . . have been inexpert about women? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman's heart? (p. 2)

Love does not open its secrets to the philosopher's dissection, and it flees from the scientist's grasp. Supposing that the truth is love? Love is something that we know is there, but trying to reduce to words and capture it on paper represents a serious misunderstanding. It is more caught by the spirit as the minstrel sings

Well, then what's to be the reason for

for becoming man and wife?

Is it love that brings you here, or love

that brings you life?

For 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.

He is now to be among you at the

calling of your hearts,

He is now to be among you at the

calling of your hearts,

rest assured this troubadour is acting

on His part.

For the union of your spirits has caused Him

to remain,

for whenever two or more of your are

gathered in His name

There is love.

A man shall leave his mother and a woman

leave her home,

They shall travel on to where the two

shall be as one.

As it was in the beginning is now and

'till the end,

woman draws her life from man and gives

it back again

and there is love (Stookey, 1971, n.p.).

Love is more of a mystical force: a spirit -- the active component in meaning. We make and create love in our meaning. And yet, after we have succeeded in "awaking" love, it seems that love was there all the time and we were just missing the dance. Love is not passive; it requires our active stance toward the world. It requires the participation of our lives.

Love is a commitment and a choice: a saying "yes" to love. "It is believed that to fall in love is already the culmination of love, while actually it is the beginning and only an for the achievement of love" (Fromm, 1947, p. 106).

Love is an opportunity to create another world -- an invitation to the spirit to glimpse another reality. It is an invitation to meaning. "Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a 'standing in,' and not a 'falling for"' (Fromm, 1956, p. 18). Love is defined: it is where we choose to face life and unveil its meaning. It is difficult to define love beforehand because love is the active component in the creation of meaning. It is through love that people reach, transcend their boundaries, and allow meaning to come into play.

Love thus offers a different paradigm and source of meaning than the heroic. Love is certainly as strong or stronger than death. It makes one feel in place in the universe. Love offers a different kind of drama and relatedness than that of the hero. Love is the attainment which the which the magical tradition emphasized: it is relatedness -- an overcoming of separateness and feeling a part of "something" else. Love provides meaning and makes sense of one's existence: "Genuine love is rooted in productiveness . . . to be alive means to be productive, to use one's powers not for any purpose transcending man, but for oneself, to make sense of one's existence, to be human" (Fromm, 1947, p. 103)

Yet, no matter how much we think we know of love, from time to time, we are all left with our faces pressed to the glass. So much of what we say e know of love is based in faith on glimpses that we have seen.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but have not love, I gain nothing. If I give away all I have .... but have not love, I gain nothing . . . . Love is patient and kind . . . . Love does not insist on its own way . . . . Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends; as for prophecy, it will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away . . . . For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love (Holy Bible, Corinthians: 13).

There is the faith as a self-fulfilling prophecy which transforms visions as hopes become real. But the power of faith and the future vision of hope are nothing without the experience of love. Love is where we choose to celebrate life. It is our experience of meaning.

This is why love is such a difficult subject. We are dealing not with just subjectivity, but with meaning itself. Love is where people have allowed themselves to face life. It is where they have allowed themselves to be touched to the core. Meaning is thus the thread that runs through the various forms of love. Yet to conceive of love as the active component in the creating of meaning, perhaps, obscures as much as it clarifies.

So far in approaching love directly, I have been content to cite my favorite understandings of love. To approach love in a systematic manner, we need a more thorough understanding of other treatments of the subject. We need to explore major understandings of love throughout history.

Plato's Approach to Love

Like most historical reviews, this will return us immediately to Plato. Plato's views place us squarely in the humanistic tradition. Love is seen as intertwined with the Good and the Beautiful. For Plato (416 BC, p. 86f), love is generation and birth in beauty: "Love is desire for the perpetual possession of the good . . . . Its object is to procreate and bring forth in beauty."

Plato is not speaking of the birth of children, per se, but of the generation of ideas and the movement of history. According to Plato, love belongs neither to the human world nor the divine. It is the bridge between the two. It is neither part of the real world nor part of the ideal world, but a "spirit" transiting the passage. Between the dream and the real, love is "a being of intermediate nature, a spirit that bridges the gap between them and prevents the universe from falling into two separate halves" (Plato, 416 BC, p. 81).

It is a movement towards the ideal, yet it is an experience in the real. Love is an experience in this moment, but it also seeks for future moments. The spirit of love -- the desire for generation and birth in beauty while moving toward the Good -- is what has sown the

seeds of most of the progress of man and the art and religion which we have surrounded our lives. It is a desire for progeny either physical or spiritual: to leave behind a legacy of love.

Love represents a passage from the mundane toward the Good and the Beautiful. It is the relation of the dreamer to the real in a gentle evolution across time.

Romantic Love