Wednesday 21 March 2007

Pic of the day: A common mistake (or even THE common mistake) is to equate love with the feelings the other cause in us. This is certainly relevant, but it is not everything. Or ideally not.

What love is

Eight years ago was probably the first time I tried to define love in my journal. I have tried again every other year or so, at random times of the year and probably of the day, for the results vary from time to time. But I think I'm getting pretty close now, because I am starting to see the connection to a couple other important revelations of the last few years. A very important part of love is seeing the other person as real.

We humans don't come with a natural (instinctive) ability to deal with the kind of large societies we live in. We cannot deal with thousands and thousands of people. So in our minds we reduce most of them to "non player characters", as we say in role playing games. They are not really real to us. The bus driver is just a bus driver, not a person. The young woman on the sidewalk is just a long flowing hair and wiggly butt, not a real human with her own career, family, hopes, dreams, worries and a soul. The only real people are I and my family and friends, perhaps my coworkers and the people at church, if any.

Being real is not quite enough. Some people are real but our natural reaction is to hate them rather than love them. This is usually because they get in our way. They are real to us, but as an obstruction, not as someone who is valuable in their own right. When they say "there is a thin line between love and hate", it is precisely because both of them refer to real people. We neither love nor hate the non-people, the cardboard cutouts that populate our streets. For this reason also it is said that "the opposite of love is not hate but indifference". Actually both hate and indifference are opposites of love, but not along the same axis. Love can turn to hate and the other way around, because they are both acutely real.

And I still think "love" is not a good word. But I guess for most people there is no need for the other, for Agape. I am not sure they are capable of it. I am not quite sure about myself either, but at least I have a pretty good idea of what it is.

When things are real to us but they get in our way, we hate them. When things are real to us and they help us along, we love them. As an e-pal said when my journal was still young: Infatuation is the belief that another will make my life better. (I generally only feel that way about computers, and even then only in moderation these days.) Because humans are social creatures, it is the default that others are helpful to us, since the alternative is the pain of loneliness. So it is natural to love the people who are real to us, unless they do something actively to make us hate them. Siblings usually do that, and most of us grow up hating at least one brother or sister, if we had any, though I guess many love and hate the same person. Certainly they tend to get upset when he or she dies. I hated my oldest brother until I was around 15. Then something changed inside me. I fear that this something does not happen to most people.

***

The love I have spoken of so far is still selfish. We love the others because they make us feel good. That feeling could come from actual assistance; reasonably sane parents, for instance, are a great help for any child. Or it could be, as I mentioned, just their company. It is still an important thing to most people, who are very lonely because they don't live with an invisible friend, for some reason. And of course there are the good feelings that come from sexual attraction, especially when it is mutual. All this is selfish love, even though it inspires us to act unselfishly, as a kind of repayment.

But then there is the love that sees the other as precious and valuable in its own right. Good parents feel this way about their child, for instance. They don't just love their child because it is cuddly and smiles sweetly, although babies can do that. There is a very real instinct in humans that cause lots of pleasure hormones to be released when a baby gazes into their eyes. (This reflex is defective in a few people, though I don't know if it is a mutation or if something horrible has destroyed it while they were infants.) People who are in love can, it seems, do the same thing with just each other, without babies. Anyway, babies can make you feel good. (Baby rats can make mother rats feel good too. It is not very spiritual, unless rats are very spiritual; they are probably more so than we think, but that doesn't say much.)

But Agape, the Divine Love, goes beyond any hope of reward or any debt of gratitude. In this love, the other is as real as I am, if not more so, and valuable as a subject, not as an object. Rather I am the object in this relation, for it is their wellbeing that is at the core of that love, not mine. I think some parents really are like that too, but not nearly all and probably not most. Certainly not most young parents, who often became parents by accident and are still parasites inside, still thinking that getting is better than giving. (Later in life, the natural progression of a human life demands that it give more than it gets, and having an outlet for love is more important than being loved.)

As I have mentioned before, sometimes I walk down the street and spontaneously I start to see people as humans, and marvel at the fact that each of these is the center of their own universe, as real to themselves as mine is to me. That each of them is the most important person that has ever lived, and the world begins and ends with them. It seems almost impossible, and indeed they probably are slightly less conscious than I am. On the other hand, their emotions are probably stronger, more intense and more genuine. This certainly seems to be the rule with those I have come to know for some reason.

But to me, seeing random people that way is just a "peak experience", not my default state of mind. This is probably all for the good. When the Bible tells us to love our "neighbor", it admits to the fact that we are simply not able to love everyone, nor do we have the resources to act on such a love even should we feel it. I don't even think "neighbor" is meant literally. It could just as well be your coworker, these days when we are not all farmers. Or even your LiveJournal friends. Perhaps your SuperGroup in City of Heroes… but probably not. ^_^ For if love requires others to be real to me, it should only apply to real people. Of course, being a real person is hard enough in real life. More about that another time, perhaps.