WHAT IS LOVE? Let's be honest. Love is a social phenomenon, not a natural one. Only human beings busy themselves with notions (or should I say burdens?) of love. By contrast, nurturing is undeniably natural. We've all witnessed animals taking care of their offspring. But we never think that by doing so they are loving their puppies, kittens, cubs or whatever. They are acting on the basis of pure instinct, conforming to their irresistible natural programming. I am sure that many a young - human - mother has described the behavior of household pets to her own children in terms of love. "See, honey, the momma cat loves her little kitties. See how she takes care of them? Mommy loves you just the same." No wonder we're so screwed up as a society. We don't properly communicate with our children. For a mother to speak this way to her child (and we all know that countless of them do so), is to plant ideas in the child's head that simply are not true. Later, when the child grows up and discovers the real truth about such matters, it is no wonder that they (at about the same time) begin to develop negative feelings toward their parents, feelings that they quite often do not understand. They will in most cases continue to speak highly of their parents, wondering at the same time about the unpleasantness swelling deep inside them, an opaque negativity that they can't quite grasp. They know full well that the feelings are there, but instinctively want to deny them. Their parents (their loving and nurturing parents) decieved them. And, yes, on an intellectual level they understand that the deception was in no way intentional. But it doesn't seem to matter. The negativity persists nevertheless. We naturally trust our parents. One of the biggest things we trusted them with was the information they poured into our heads. But we grew up and surveyed the territory for ourselves and saw that it just wasn't so. The psychoanalysts were correct. We do indeed repress parentally-derived negativity and unpleasantness. These repressed feelings constitute the very bedrock of much of our own negativity, doubt and cynicism. What sort of society can we honestly expect to have whose members have psyches established on such a foundation? Sane societies are not built upon ideas that are founded upon the insane. The social distortion we know of as love is openly recognized as such a form of insanity. It is clearly evident in the fact that we so often say that we are crazy about someone that we are attracted to. In the interest of moving toward some kind of balance, the most sane approach to the social occlusion we so popularly refer to as love is surely that of Erich Fromm's. If you've never read it, I highly recommend that you lay your hands on a copy of The Art of Loving. I included its first chapter in my book, Selections, a collection of some of my favorite influential reading. I go a little wacky when I hear people (in real life or the movies) talk about falling in love. "Falling in love," is one of my favorite phrases to hate. (I guess that makes it something that I love to hate.) Basically, I think it's bogus. I mean, really. How do you fall in love? And even worse is falling out of it. Talk about nonsense. As Dr. Fromm put it, instead of falling in love, why not talk about standing in it? Don't get me wrong; I believe as well as the next person that our tastes are pretty much dictated by DNA. If you like chocolate pie, there's no reason to launch into a long dissertation to explain why. You are made (at the molecular level, a place where you have absolutely no control) to like it. The same is true of other people. Sometimes you just like someone, and sometimes you don't. And just like the chocolate-pie-thing, there is no explaining it. It goes too deep. (Hence the popular refrain: there is no accounting for taste.) But hopelessly and helplessly falling in love? I'm not so sure about that one. If such were indeed possible, it would suggest that love was a natural thing. Somehow I don't think so. I believe love is a purely social phenomenon, something absolutely unique to human culture. And I think we need a better word for it. "Love" is too much of a catch-all. A guy sees Jessica Simpson (or a Jessica Simpson type) and says he loves her; and you know, on a certain level he probably does. I mean, don't you, when you bite into a delicious piece of pie, close your eyes and say, "God, I love this pie"? And who's going to argue with you? You do love it. But if someone were to challenge you about it, you'd probably reply with something like, "Well, I don't mean that kind of love." Which is exactly the problem, that kind of love. The Greeks had four different words for love. You could be reading a Greek text, like the New Testament for example, see the word love and pass right over it without so much as blinking an eye. But you would be mighty surprised if you delved into it and found different Greek words all translated as the one English word: love. The Greek words for love are eros, philo, stergo and agape. Eros is the root of erotic, so that in Greece if you saw a couple in the street engaged in an act of sexual coitus, even if they were only actors, you could say that they were loving each other. Philo is the reason the city of Philadelphia is called the city of brotherly love, because that's exactly the kind of love it suggests. There was a dude I used to work with who was famous for saying "Love you like a brother." If he had been speaking Greek he wouldn't have needed to clarify it by saying "like a brother." He'd have only had to say, "Philo you (or whatever the Greek word for 'you' is)." The rest would have been understood. Stergo refers to love amongst family members, including their pets. Agape is the highest form of love, always described as the kind of love that comes from God. It is pure, and definitely untainted by Eros. When I look over this list of love words I'm hard put to select one that matches the idea that is trying to be depicted in the movies (and consequently our entire culture). A couple said to be in love (in today's world) certainly wouldn't say that their love was based on Eros, although, to be sure, there might certainly be an element of that in the mix (at least we hope so). They're also not going to the other extreme and say that their love is like God's love, which would totally exclude Eros. That leaves us with Philo and Stergo, and neither of them seems to work either. What man is going to say to his woman that he loves her like a brother, or his mother or sister or Aunt Polly? So what the hell are we talking about when we say that two people are in love? In the first place, there definitely has to be something that is inexplicable, something that we simply like about the person, and always with no possibility of explaining why. At least, you better hope you can't explain it. In affairs of the heart, as soon as someone (our intended) enters the world of the explicable, we somehow seem to lose interest in them. This could mean that it isn't the person we like at all, just the fact that we don't know why we like them (which means we are in love with a notion swirling around inside our own head). Everybody loves a mystery. If you are not attracted to someone physically in the first place, the chances are slim that you will ever give a solitary damn about anything that comes out of their mouth. But ... Once you get past the physical, you are in a different world, the world of soul. And there we usually do have a choice about whether or not we like someone. It is one thing to be astoundingly physically attractive, and another to be the same on the soul plane (whatever the hell that means). I have encountered women who I loved at first sight, but who, after a little conversation with them, set my ship on a whole new course. To be technically precise, I did not actually love them as much as their physical manifestation. Once I realized that I did not love their soul, or spirit, or psychic manifestation, I knew that I did not love them. To love someone, then, means to be helplessly enamored of both their physical and psychic manifestations. There may be a certain helplessness with the physical part, but it's the psychic part I'm not so sure about.
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