Among the valued newcomers to RAMH‘s roll of occasional commenters, you may have encountered one “Ashleigh Burrows.”
(I use the quotation marks there because that name, as I understand it, is a nom de plume. Which makes it interesting that she calls her blog The Burrow: it’s an eponym for a pseudonym, and how many times can one claim to have seen one of those before?)
a/b, as she styles herself in her comments here, there, and elsewhere, is (like many of us) a writer still unconvinced that simply writing well is enough. When not actively fretting along those lines, she fills in the blog with, well, good writing on a wide variety of topics — provocative questions, political commentary, accounts of daily life with a cast of bizarrely nicknamed characters (The Big Guy and G’ma, sure, got them, and the Big and Little Cuter I pretty much understand to be her kids — but Amster? Aged Parm?)…
Anyway, I direct your attention to a recent post at The Burrow, “Is It Love?” It’s full of the sort of nagging, not-quite-rhetorical questions which some of us (yes) love to chew on:
- Can one look at another with devotion and desire, knowing that the feelings are not returned, and still call it love?
- Is there a cognitive component that is necessary for love to exist?
- Can you love someone you do not need? If the loved one were to vanish and you felt no pain, did you really love at all?
And so on. She sums up:
Many, many questions. I’m not sure the answers are available. I’m not sure that your answers would be mine (or [jilted lover of Aeneas] Dido’s). I just know that love is strange.
Aye. That it is… strange, and troublesome as hell. Even more than “the sex talk,” I wonder how parents manage “the love talk” for their blossoming charges. I don’t have any kids myself, of course. But if I did, what follows would be how I might try to explain it to them — in hopes of arming them before the first thunderbolt hit.*
Back in the mid-1970s, I had occasion — for reasons probably not at all mysterious — to participate in a program called Marriage Encounter. (It had been affiliated from the start with the Catholic Church, a fact which is neither here nor there for purposes of this story.) The then-Missus and I came away from it with a variety of books to read and precepts to mull over. Among the latter was one which struck me with great force at the time, and to this day continues both to haunt and to reassure me:
Love isn’t a feeling. It’s a decision.
Oh, sure, love is founded on a whole set of feelings. But it seems no more to be those feelings (let alone a single one of them) than, say, a loaf of fresh bread is a cup of flour, or the oven in which you bake it.
What gets people into trouble (it certainly got me into trouble, and more than once) is mistaking the part for the whole. I can’t say that it’s easy to find new relationships which jazz you, make you dizzy and excited, but nor is it (in my experience) difficult. Such overloads of feeling, for some, can come along a half-dozen times or more over the course of life. And I think people who insist that this “should” not happen, and condemn those to whom it does, are barking up the wrong tree. It’s not a matter of morality or ethics. It’s biology. It’s pheromones, hormones, neurochemistry. For that matter, who knows, maybe it’s all wrapped up in living out issues unresolved from past lives, y’know? It’s just not love.
Here’s the thing, though: if you at least tentatively can view love as a particular sort of decision, you can see your way clear to sanity. You prove you love somebody by deciding to love him or her, and only him or her. It’s love only over the long haul, not just while gasoline is being poured on the flames.
Note that this doesn’t require the decision to work both ways; there’s plenty of room in this definition for unrequited love. Petrarch could be said, pretty convincingly, to love his Laura.
Did Aeneas love Dido? She certainly thought so, and maybe he did, too… right up till he blew town. (After which, she opted to kill herself by running into Aeneas’s sword, and I bet Freud must have loved that detail.) I simply can’t talk myself into believing it. If it didn’t last, it wasn’t love.
a/b brings up another seeming paradox, that of battered spouses and their batterers:
I’ve interviewed bruised and beaten women who insist that they are loved and that they love in return. I don’t understand it, but I accept it as their version of the truth.
Me, too. It’s got nothing to do with a love — a decision — that I’d ever want a part of. But it fits the definition I’ve laid out here. It’s confusing only if we think of love as a particular feeling (a yearning, a delicate or burning passion, whatever). At the time of a beating, any feeling like that must be very far from both parties’ minds; neither of them at that moment can possibly be singing to themselves, say, The Association’s “Cherish.” It’s not, y’know, right. So we think: How can that be love?
Easy. It’s not love because of how they feel. They’ve decided to love each other regardless of how they feel.
Which opens up another whole can of nasty wrigglers: So then love — a decision to love — can be wrong/evil/unhealthy/bad for the one who makes the decision, and/or for its object?
I don’t know, but I think so; I think there’s as much evidence for that, as for love’s being beautiful/grand/the source of all bliss/etc.
What about you?
________________________
* Of course, there are plenty of ways to use the word “love” casually and in conversation, without argument from any given reasonable person. Or even from me. :)
cynth says
I used to wonder how I would know if I were in love. If I wasn’t walking into trees or dancing around the streets, did that mean I wasn’t in love? Because so much of my childhood was enriched with old songs, I kept waiting to experience the feeling of: “I hear music and there’s no one there. I see flowers but the trees are bare. All day long I seem to walk on air, I wonder why. I wonder why.”
Reflecting back, I think it was both conscious and unconscious in looking at my decision to stay with the one person who is undoubtedly the right person for me. He has a romantic soul which I don’t think anyone sees and he is pragmatic enough to suggest that if I hear music and there’s no one there, then my hearing aids must be on the fritz and I should get them fixed.
Hard to argue with that kind of yin and yang.
marta says
Spot on topic for today.
This evening my son asked how moms make babies. Yea.
And in other news, one of my best friends is struggling with whether or not she is in love. She’s met this man online and she isn’t sure he’s telling the truth and even if any man will ever really love her.
The idea of love as a decision hadn’t occurred to me before, but it is perfect for me.
Nance says
I love it that you featured a/b!
My HATT (husband at the time) and I trained to be co-leaders for one of those seventies programs. Whenever we participated in a group, all the women fell in love with HATT. Imagine how that fiddled with our group outcomes, please.
Still, that love as decision thing stuck with me, too. So I put it to use in my next marriage. Thirty-six years later, I think there might be something to it.
As for infatuation, I reserve the right to it forever, as long as I’m the only one who knows of it.
Ashleigh Burroughs says
Oh, JES, I don’t know what to say. I’m overcome, overwhelmed and over the top with joy and now I’ll stop reveling in the wonderful words you’ve sent my way and thank you, not only for the kind shout out, but for the notion of love as a decision. It does tend to clarify things – especially when abuse is involved – and it is also very empowering. I’m going to toss it around in my head for a while… and I’m going to link this post to mine. What an interesting conversation we’ve started ;)
BTW – Aged Parm(igiana) is the 90 year old mother of The Big Cheese and Amster is my friend Amy’s blogononym.
a/b
Rain says
I remember Marriage Encounters too and many couples who went to them although we never did. What I think is that love and being in love are two different things. Books can be written about both. It’s a good thing I didn’t go to Marriage Encounter because I’d likely have been one of their dissenters as I don’t really believe that love is a decision. I think determining to stay in a relationship despite it not being perfect, opting to not be involved with others while in that relationship, seeing the best in your partner rather than the worst, concentrating on the positives, those are decisions. But love, that I am less sure is.
To me love is unexplainable and it doesn’t necessarily make sense. It is not under our control even when we might sometimes find it inconvenient. It is not limited to one person at a time. It doesn’t have to be healthy either.
I wrote about it too awhile back, which led to my recently having thought about it quite a bit, in my case with the subject of being in the moment and love. It’s all very complex and yet simple. It’s our culture that makes it more complicated.
It is an important thing to consider though and talk about. I think parents need to really teach their kids about it and I tried with mine when I had the chance because we see too many kids who kill themselves over it without a concept of this isn’t all there is. Maybe they pay attention to too many idyllic movies that really aren’t about love at all but the other stuff that sometimes goes along with it.
marta says
Well, you got me thinking about my past…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE61Bz7IHKg
;)
John says
cynth: Lovely comment. I suspect a lot more of us have been influenced by “old” Hollywood and music than we can remember. (In her post, by the way, a/b cites several of those old films — none musicals, in her case.)
It pleases me no end that you wound up with that romantic, pragmatic, right person.
John says
marta: One of these days you will have to describe (even if just in fiction) that moment with your son. I always imagined that with my hypothetical child, for me it would be a combination of a sort of heartbreak and looking around for the nearest exit.
The Missus and I met online in 1991; that sort of question about what the other person’s “really” like cropped up any number of times. When we made arrangements to meet for real for the first time. a few months after we’d first crossed cyberpaths, her friends and sisters were freaking out a little that she was flying off by herself to meet with an ax murderer. She wasn’t too worried, though (at least that’s what she always told me :)). By that time we’d been exchanging thousands of words online every day, on all kinds of subjects. These looooong replies would sometimes come back within an hour, even minutes, of whatever prompted them. I think it would have been just too hard to fake, on either of our parts. If we’d been exchanging one brief email a day, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be in Florida right now (as I’ve been since ’93). Or she wouldn’t, ha!
Nance: Thank you so much for having introduced me to a/b’s place!
Complicated though the relationship between patient and therapist can become when it’s one-on-one, make it multiple parties on either end of the transaction and the relationship map becomes (almost?) too complex to understand.
For a few months some years ago, The Missus and I had joint sessions with a therapist who’d come highly recommended. Our therapy with him/her ended after we learned, entirely accidentally, some bits of his/her personal life which really caused us to question the validity, even the reasonableness, of a lot of the advice and direction we’d received so far. Talk about awkward.
Your comment suggests, btw, that someone out there, somewhere, needs to be blogging confessionally under the title “Running After Her HATT.”
John says
a/b: So glad you appreciated the love/decision thing, although as I say I can take no credit for it. (And at that, it took me almost 30 years to put it into practice, leaving behind the smoldering, tangled wreckage of way too many relationships.)
When I first heard it myself, it sounded stupid — after all, everyone knows love is a feeling!. And it also sounded, well… it sounded like a peculiarly unappealing, unromantic way of regarding romantic love. Like, given a choice between the fizzy-lightheaded-movie-musical sort of love, and the “I decide to” love, why would anyone choose the latter?
Not to go all violins-and-flowers on y’all, but only since finally deciding to love, though, have I had the experience of deep and lasting love. It’d be presumptuous for me to identify The Missus as the beneficiary of the awakening, but she’s my “it” girl.
John says
Rain: Thank you so much for stopping by to add to the conversation here as well as at a/b’s place!
I can’t say I myself was a Marriage Encounter fan, although I reserved my doubts and complaints for conversation with The then-Missus and didn’t raise them in sessions with others.
Your distinction between love (often only one-way) and relationship (always two-way) works for me, too. I think we’re saying sorta the same thing; I’m just using “romantic love” for the simple “love” in your formulation, and “love as a decision” for “relationship.”
(For the record, Rain’s thoughts about love and relationship and “the moment” appeared in a pair of posts from a couple of weeks ago, here and here.)
(Oh, and this isn’t addressed to Rain in particular, just an observation: I really wish I could hear something besides chirping from some Y-chromosomed crickets besides me!)
John says
marta: You may (probably do) know this already, but Howard Jones was born to Welsh parents, and lived in Wales during his early childhood — in Cardiff, specifically. Not that I myself knew that — thank you, Wikipedia — but I did think it was an interesting choice of video from you. Especially since he’s walking around a city in a long dark coat. It would have been really scary if he’d been brandishing an old-fashioned revolver and jumping into a black SUV. Heh.
The Querulous Squirrel says
I agree with Ashleigh that love being a choice is very empowering and that most of the teenage and adult women who stay with abusers will say I can’t leave him because I love him. They feel totally passive about love. I think that in most love relationships, one person loves the other more and helps persuade the decision. I think we can love many people in our lifetime but who we commit to is definitely a choice.
John says
Squirrel: Yes. I was trying to avoid using the C(ommitment)-word because it’s become such a cliché of pop/self-help culture, but that’s it, exactly.
Rain says
It is an interesting conversation, John. I just read about a teen-age boy who killed himself when his lover had rejected his love. Because he was gay and other suicides among gays have happened, it has gotten a lot of press but for the wrong reasons. It sounds like he had a comfortable grasp on his sexuality and wasn’t facing rejection because of that. He just couldn’t handle losing that ‘love’ and that happens too often with kids. They really do need to understand that love doesn’t demand relationship and that one relationship being lost doesn’t mean life is over. It’s the same with women who love a man who abuses them. Love doesn’t mean you have to be with that person if the relationship is damning. I think you are right, you and I do agree on this.
John says
Oh, jeez, Rain — you’re right, the focus on news reports about these kids is invariably the fact of their gayness, not their simple heartbreak. (That is: what makes them different, not some experience we might have had in common with them.)
It’s so appealing, the idea of a single soul mate, THE love of one’s life. (Something like the idea of unicorns, now that I think about it.) You can see the evolutionary value in it, in that it can act as a sort of artificial glue holding a family unit together. But the flood of corrosive emotion when it all goes wrong with The One… I don’t think anything reliably prepares you for that.
Froog says
I come a bit late to this one.
I think, JES, your rejection of conventional definitions/conceptions may lead to some useful new perspectives on the topic – but doesn’t ultimately hold up. ‘Love’ – romantic love, infatuation – is, in just about everyone’s experience and understanding, a feeling; whereas it is choosing to enter into – and remain in – a relationship that is a decision. That decision is often prompted by feelings of being in love – but often not.
One observation on this topic that struck me very powerfully when I first heard it as a kid came from James Stewart in the Civil War film Shenandoah. Near the start of the film, a young buck (Doug McClure, I think it is) comes to Jimmy’s wealthy patriarch to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Jimmy quizzes him, Do you like my daughter? The young man is at first baffled by the question, and responds indignantly that he loves here. And Jimmy says something like, Well, of course you do. She’s a very charming young woman. Half the men in the county are in love with her. But do you LIKE her?
The wise old bird was suggesting that the flush of infatuate love inevitably fades over time, and that a relationship needs to be based on a deeper and more lasting affinity, a comprehensive mutual understanding and respect. It’s far too easy to fall in love (and out of love) with someone without really knowing very much about them at all.
Froog says
The notion of ‘love as decision’ prompts me to reflect on how far language colours our experience of emotions. Once we apply the label ‘love’ to how we are feeling about someone, I think our feelings about them – or our perception of our feelings – move more towards what we expect infatuate, romantic love to be like. Likewise, I think we can sometimes resist ‘falling in love’ with someone by refusing to think about our feelings in these terms. It’s probably one reason why people are so cautious about first uttering the words “I love you”.
And maybe we make this issue even more confusing for ourselves by having this one word to describe a range of different feelings and situations – conflating sexual attraction with familial bonds and the affection we feel for friends. Some languages – Ancient Greek, for example – try to differentiate these varities of love by having distinct words for them.
marta says
@John – I was the biggest Howard Jones fan as a teen–and I’ve seen him in concert twice. And I drew a lot of pictures of boys and girls with Howard hair. Back then I knew he was from Wales, but over the years I’d forgotten until you just reminded me. Good on you and of course he’s from Cardiff! Clearly, I need to move there.
fg says
Thank you JES, so thought provoking and so well written (really you cover so much succinctly). Sorry I missed it earlier – have a big deadline on.
Its interesting, I think, that so much of our understand of love is learnt young. Its no excuse for being disfunctional its just what it is our frame of reference. I think as with any education to be able to speak to children about aspects of this is enlightening. Of course most people come up against the do-as-I-say. Not do-as-I-do. But then that’s life too so. (as John says the last thing kids need is pressure to find The One.)
In my experience I always took the notion that one makes a decision to love as red. I understood that that decision was necessary. Sure there are all sorts of connections (flirtations/crushes/interests/lusts) which we hold with some of those around us at various points in our life-times development but when two people take the decision/recognition/desire to love, it takes it far and away somewhere else, as they say, ‘to another level’.
There are of course difficulties. ha ha. I think the two main ones are that it takes two – the ‘other level’ thing doesn’t happen with one. Never. (no matter how you plead with yourself that it may be so.) And no. 2 is that you never have an idea what is going on with others and they won’t change but you can bring yourself to an emotionally stable place where you can say, “I would like to make this decision to love with another person. I AM READY.” This, I think, is so much harder than it sounds. I think many people think they can muddle through without working at that and I guess its lucky for society that they do muddle because there would be a hell of a lot more single people around if they didn’t. (Politicians don’t want that.) I think when you break it down a huge number of people aren’t really prepared. Most of my adult life I have been channeling the signal, I’M NOT READY.
But funny thing is that when someone is prepared it seems surreal because loving someone is sort ummm, easy.
But that of course is only the beginning. You have to grow this love thing like a house plant. So you love each other, you came through, you shared but then you live together say, five years. You are either going to develop together or apart. It depends what each person is responsible for bringing to the table and if they can. I think this is where the like vs love comes in. Goodness I heard a lot of talk of this when I was a child. I love him/her but I don’t like him/her.
I think for someone like me real love will be rare mostly because of who I am. I am very fortunate because I was in love for years with my first boyfriend because (in no small part) he loved me too. It was amazing. I hate to say it but I think many people may never fall in love (maybe that’s because its what I was told as a child? A question for me to sort out.)
To boil it down I suppose my dream of love (and I hope its not a dream) is when I see older couples (say in their sixties, post family) walking together with a glint in their eye and soft faces. Now that would be a gift.
fg says
Re abusive relationships.
The sick can’t always recognise what they are do. ie when they see it and know the damage they do and they keep doing it. Women decide to love. But you bring your understanding of yourself to the table – this is what the decision to love is based on. Do you love yourself enough to make the decision to stop loving. If you can start it you can stop it. (Of course maybe you didn’t start it, and your now confused because as you always held on to the fond recollection that he came after you so obsessively and wouldn’t take no for an answer??)
But of course the nature of abuse is to belittle, crush, dominate, and destroy your wonderful self – so wonderful a self that it so threatens your looser abuser.
(This is why they changed the law in Britain. Family abuse cases can now (and often do) come to trial with or without the woman’s consent. As she is deemed no longer fit. So common. So sad.)
John says
[For anyone still watching this thread, I DO have more to say… just looking for the right block of time in which to say it. :) Thank you all for getting me thinking so hard about one of the hardest things for me to think about on my own!]
jules says
Hubba whoa, people. This was fascinating to read.
I’m sort of speechless and lost in thought. But I’d like to add that I’ve found the hardest part of parenthood, hands down, is the knowledge that my daughters are going to learn about love and choosing a partner based on how my husband and I behave and treat each other. At least I feel I learned a lot about how to behave and not behave in love by watching my parents. Perhaps it’s more complicated than that, but I feel it’s a huge part of it.
Yet, love is so complicated, as already discussed here. And so I think about what I would *say* to them about love—and whether or not I’d even recommend they get married— and that seems even harder.
Maybe one day it will all come to me.
Ashleigh Burroughs says
You have the most interesting readers, John! This conversation has wound its way around and around my heart – I’m still thinking about it and look forward to your further thoughts on the subject. Thanks for expanding the conversation ;)
a/b
fg says
Not the same question at all but a friend messaged me the other morning (playfully I suppose) with,
“Is there life after sex?’
From the replies I have heard it seems the jury is out on that one too.
Glad youre still on the quest above and will be back.
PS. Reading mine back now I see loads of typos. Not good esp. when hanging virtually with writers.