“Can such stiff and formal moldings as words capture the spirit-essence of love?” – Pearl Buck.
The answer seems to be – it depends on who you ask.
If you ask a poet, he or she might say
My love is like a Red Red Rose
Or
You only have to let the soft animal belly of you love what it loves
Elizabeth Barrett Browning saw her love for Robert Browning as her salvation and she counted the ways. She suffered ill health and innumerable tragedies until she left her family home and eloped with Browning. Her health and happiness blossomed from that time forward. It culminated in her wish that she would love him better after death.
If you ask Jesus
Love is patient, love is kind, love endures all things.
Nietzsche
Love is a state in which man sees things, most decidedly, as they are not.
Carl Jung
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
J. Geils
Love Stinks
Science would suggest that love is natures beautiful way of keeping the species alive and reproducing.
Some would say love makes the world go round while others would shake their heads and say, not true but it is what makes the ride worthwhile.
If most people are asked about who and what they love, they will list their children, their spouse, their pets, their parents and siblings and then sometimes move on to their home or their jobs. For some, their god is at the top of the list, for others nature will be mentioned – the ocean, the woods, the moon, a season. Sometimes food. I toss in ice cream, others maybe chocolate. An activity – baseball, napping, having sex – though not necessarily in that order. Then comes a good book, a painting, a poem.
So while we all have something to say about love, what we have to say seems as diverse as we are and yet shockingly repetitive.
We like love.
We hate love.
We want love
We’re done with love
We’re open for business again.
So, moving on from trying to pin down what love is and focus more on how we love, on what is loving.
I have conducted weddings and commitment ceremonies in which couples vow to love each other in any number of ways including
Honor and cherish
Making a home
Making babies
A common concensus of protecting their love from outside threat
In my counseling office, most clients have something to say about troubled loving.
About being hurt by those they love
Being angry at those they love
Being inadequate to those they love
As parents
As children
As lovers
And yet it seems, as moth to flame, we are drawn to love all the while knowing it will more often than not be the source of our pains.
So perhaps the questions we need to ask ourselves is not so much what is love and how do we do it or even why do we do it because those answers do not seem to get to the heart of love. I read somewhere that it is not by mistake that the symbolic drawing of a heart is two teardrops linked together.
Instead we could take a vote on whether love makes us better or happier or more fulfilled and, despite the chronicles of love gone wrong my bet is that the vote would produce a lopsided victory because, as Janis Joplin said, don’t you love to be in love.
