I make no claims for this article beforehand. I don't claim that it's coherent or consistent, or that it's particularly well thought out. Given the chaotic nature of my thoughts on love, there's no reason why it should have any of the above-mentioned qualities.
C'est la vie c'est la guerre.
What is love? How do you love others? Can you, and should you if you can, love yourself? We say we love many things. We love our cars, our wives/husbands/children. We love our pets and our jobs. we say we love our country (some of us still say that). We say we love God, and that God loves us. Interestingly, we don't say our country loves us back. Our God does, but not our country.
So what is 'love'?
If a condition of love is reciprocity then we don't love our cars, our favorite computer programs, our CD collections, our houses, or any other inanimate object. Because inanimate objects don't reciprocate our 'love'. We may appreciate those things, we may become obsessed by those things, but we don't love those things - if love requires reciprocity. And if it doesn't then there's nothing at all to distinguish 'love' from gratitude for convenience or pleasure. If love doesn't require reciprocity then we might indeed love our cars, our weed-whackers, our dinky magnets stuck on the fridge. And there would be no way to tell if we did or not, because the 'relationship' would be all one way.
If there were no reciprocity involved (and so far as I can see, reciprocity is one of the defining characteristics of love) then 'love' would be no more than a measure of pleasure and satisfaction. My pleasure in the beloved object. This was in fact one of the ancient measures of love, defined and described by both Plato and Aristotle. They named it 'eros' and the 'erotic' love of our day is not at all removed from it. Hence the current obsession with how the body is to be perceived by the Other, the Lover, because 'love' in our day is a solipsistic, narcissistic thing, concerned only with the appearance of each of us in the eyes of the Other - whether and in what degree I derive pleasure from you as the object of my love, and you derive pleasure from me as the object of your love.
It is an essentially selfish way of relating to others, having no concern for them but based on the satisfaction you receive from your relationship to the Beloved. I love you to the degree that you please me. Erotic love is inherently and fundamentally selfish - and there's nothing wrong with that when all parties to the relationship realise that that is what 'love' actually is, in that relationship. God help the Idealistic Romantic who enters a 'love' affair of this sort without understanding what he's involved himself in.
I speak from experience.
Christians of all types and denominations understand a different word to mean 'love'. That word is 'Agape', and it's meaning is in 180 degrees of opposition to that of Eros. Agape is sacrificial love, Other-directed love, love that places the welfare of the Other at the heart of itself. The Christian understanding of the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross is the primordial example of 'agapaic' love.
But there's nothing to stipulate or require that the nature of such self-sacrifice (considered in purely human terms and apart from the example of Jesus) is in any sense loving. Self-sacrifice may be carried out in a spirit of emotional or moral blackmail. It may be carried out to vindicate and 'prove' the alleged love of someone for another - in which case self-sacrifice is actually self-love, self-aggrandizement, and vain-glory. It may be carried out to convict another of how little they love the Lover (look what I do for you, because I love you so much, yet you do nothing for me) in which case love is, again, self-love.
As I once, memorably, was told (and, memorably, misunderstood) to say "I love you" is in most cases to stake a claim on the future behaviour of the one you think you love. I love you. And this gift of love I make (which is in most cases nothing but an advanced and sophistated form of moral blackmail) is so unique and precious and so unlikely ever to be repeated that you must do what I want in return - because, after all, I love you.
The woman who said this to me, in relation to my own behaviour, was in fact right. What I called 'love' was in fact my own obsession with her body, plus the result of my desire that I never cease to have access to that body. On my part there were many good and pleasurable feelings associated with that desire and its satisfaction, and these good feelings along with my continued desire for the perpetuation of the source of those feelings ( ie, I wanted her to continue to live and prosper so I could continue to enjoy her) were what I mistook for love.
When we finally broke up, and we broke up because I couldn't reconcile the the purely selfish nature of the relationship I offered, and in accordance with which she tried to live, with the Idealism and the Romanticism of the relationship I thought I was offering, I was angry with her for all the wrong reasons. I had in fact had what I wanted all along from her - I was just so blind to the nature of what I wanted, and the contradiction between what I offered and had accepted and what I thought I was offering, that her attempt to give me what I wanted appeared as a direct contradiction of everything I thought was actually going on.
Love is for the clear-headed and the clear-sighted, not for the majority of us who stumble catastrophically from one disaster to another because we don't understand ourselves, let alone the ones we claim to love.
The European Medievals thought of love as a disease, a sickness, a madness that entered through the eyes and consumed the whole of the rational faculties. And they were right. Love makes us all crazy.
It does so because it makes us aware of the Other in ways which nothing else can equal in terms of power to disrupt our lives. Every time I've been in love it has been the ruin of me, the contradiction of everything I thought I was. Each time I've been in love (and I define love in relation to my own life as the obsessive concern with another to the point were the imperatives of my own existence are of no account) my life has, in one way or another, been radically transformed. Transformed to the point of destruction - until I met Sabrina. Loving her has had the most creative, positive affects and effects on my life, as compared to the consequences of any other 'love-relationship' with a woman that I've ever known.
Those before her were catalysts and engines of destruction. She has been a catalyst and engine of creation and positive change. And there are no words fit to describe my gratitude to her. She has been, in every way comprehended by the word, a revelation.
Do I love her? Yes, in the terms defined. But is that 'love'?
Let me say that by being what she is to me, she has done the rest of you no favors. She has in fact encouraged and incubated someone who thinks in ways that might be described as monstrous. But love, so they say, is blind. If I'm monstrous in my relationship to her, it's only in ways that she wants. And in wanting to be loved (who is there that is human that doesn't want to be loved?) I respond to the ways in being with her that she regards as loving. As I said, there is no love without reciprocity.
Love is protean, and impossible to describe. We all recognise it when we see it, but that doesn't mean we can put what we see into words. There is love of wife. There is love of child. There is love of father, mother, sibling. There is 'love' of those we want to fuck, and those we want to use to our advantage. There is love of those things that bring us pleasure. And for some there is love of those things that bring us pain.
Either you haven't had enough, or you like it, and we can never escape the web of what we want, or of those things of which we haven't had enough.
What we love is what we want most - whatever that might be. And so long as we live, until we realise that what we want can never give us the fullness of what we desire, we will never be able to escape the illusion that what we love will make us happy. And while we continue to believe that what will make us happy is what is truly worth loving we will never escape from the trap we have set for ourselves.
And the trap is this, and nothing else but this: to mistake the reality of what we want for the reality of the way the Universe as it actually is.
Continue to love. You'll never be anything but disappointed.