{"id":7910,"date":"2010-10-02T15:05:18","date_gmt":"2010-10-02T19:05:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=7910"},"modified":"2010-10-02T15:05:18","modified_gmt":"2010-10-02T19:05:18","slug":"is-it-love-local-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/is-it-love-local-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Is It Love? <em>(Local Edition)<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" title=\"Very first 'Love Is...' cartoon, LA Times, January 5, 1970\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/loveis_19700105.jpg?resize=168%2C328&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"168\" height=\"328\" \/>Among the valued newcomers to <em>RAMH<\/em>&#8216;s roll of occasional commenters, you may have encountered one &#8220;Ashleigh Burrows.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>(I use the quotation marks there because that name, as I understand it, is a <em>nom de plume<\/em>. Which makes it interesting that she calls her blog <em>The Burrow<\/em>: it&#8217;s an eponym for a pseudonym, and how many times can one claim to have seen one of those before?)<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8212; provocative questions, political commentary, accounts of daily life with a cast of bizarrely nicknamed characters (The Big Guy and G&#8217;ma, sure, got them, and the Big and Little Cuter I pretty much understand to be her kids &#8212; but <em>Amster<\/em>? <em>Aged Parm<\/em>?)&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I direct your attention to a recent post at <em>The Burrow<\/em>, &#8220;<a title=\"The Burrow: 'Is It Love?'\" href=\"http:\/\/ashleighburroughs.blogspot.com\/2010\/10\/is-it-love.html\" target=\"_blank\">Is It Love?<\/a>&#8221; It&#8217;s full of the sort of nagging, not-quite-rhetorical questions which some of us (yes) <em>love<\/em> to chew on:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>Can one look at another with devotion and desire, knowing that the feelings are not returned, and still call it love?<\/li>\n<li>Is there a cognitive component that is necessary for love to exist?<\/li>\n<li>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?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>And so on. She sums up:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Many, many questions. I&#8217;m not sure the answers are available. I&#8217;m not sure that your answers would be mine (or [jilted lover of Aeneas] Dido&#8217;s). I just know that love is strange.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Aye. That it is&#8230; strange, and troublesome as hell. Even more than &#8220;the sex talk,&#8221; I wonder how parents manage &#8220;the love talk&#8221; for their blossoming charges. I don&#8217;t have any kids myself, of course. But if I did, what follows would be how I might try to explain it to them &#8212; in hopes of arming them before the first thunderbolt hit.*<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Back in the mid-1970s, I had occasion &#8212; for reasons probably not at all mysterious &#8212; 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:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><em>Love isn&#8217;t a feeling. It&#8217;s a decision.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Oh, sure, love is <em>founded on<\/em> a whole set of feelings. But it seems no more to <em>be<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<p>What gets people into trouble (it certainly got <em>me<\/em> into trouble, and more than once) is mistaking the part for the whole. I can&#8217;t say that it&#8217;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 &#8220;should&#8221; not happen, and condemn those to whom it does, are barking up the wrong tree. It&#8217;s not a matter of morality or ethics. It&#8217;s biology. It&#8217;s pheromones, hormones, neurochemistry. For that matter, who knows, maybe it&#8217;s all wrapped up in living out issues unresolved from past lives, y&#8217;know? It&#8217;s just not <em>love<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/dido.jpg?ssl=1\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" title=\"Dido, about to tickle herself with Aeneas's sword (painting by Sacchi Andrea (1599-1661))\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/dido_sm.jpg?resize=275%2C255&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"275\" height=\"255\" \/><\/a>Here&#8217;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. <em>You prove you love somebody by <\/em>deciding<em> to love him or her, and only him or her<\/em>. It&#8217;s love only over the long haul, not just while gasoline is being poured on the flames.<\/p>\n<p>Note that this doesn&#8217;t require the decision to work both ways; there&#8217;s plenty of room in this definition for unrequited love. Petrarch could be said, pretty convincingly, to <a title=\"Wikipedia, on Petrarch and Laura\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Petrarch#Laura_and_poetry\" target=\"_blank\">love his Laura<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Did <a title=\"Wikipedia, on Dido as depicted in Virgil's 'Aeneid'\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dido_%28Queen_of_Carthage%29#Virgil.27s_Aeneid\" target=\"_blank\">Aeneas love Dido<\/a>? She certainly thought so, and maybe he did, too&#8230; right up till he blew town. (After which, she opted to kill herself by running into Aeneas&#8217;s sword, and I bet Freud must have <em>loved<\/em> that detail.) I simply can&#8217;t talk myself into believing it. If it didn&#8217;t last, it wasn&#8217;t love.<\/p>\n<p>a\/b brings up another seeming paradox, that of battered spouses and their batterers:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I&#8217;ve interviewed bruised and beaten women who insist that they are loved and that they love in return.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t understand it, but I accept it as their version of the truth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Me, too. It&#8217;s got nothing to do with a love &#8212; a decision &#8212; that I&#8217;d ever want a part of. But it fits the definition I&#8217;ve laid out here. It&#8217;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&#8217; minds; neither of them at that moment can possibly be singing to themselves, say, The Association&#8217;s &#8220;<a title=\"YouTube: 'Cherish,' by The Association\" href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=_zoys4_7VYg\" target=\"_blank\">Cherish<\/a>.&#8221; It&#8217;s not, y&#8217;know, <em>right<\/em>. So we think: <em>How can that be love?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Easy. It&#8217;s not love because of how they feel. They&#8217;ve <em>decided<\/em> to love each other regardless of how they feel.<\/p>\n<p>Which opens up another whole can of nasty wrigglers: So then love &#8212; a decision to love &#8212; can be wrong\/evil\/unhealthy\/bad for the one who makes the decision, and\/or for its object?<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know, but I think so; I think there&#8217;s as much evidence for that, as for love&#8217;s being beautiful\/grand\/the source of all bliss\/etc.<\/p>\n<p>What about you?<\/p>\n<p>________________________<\/p>\n<p>* Of course, there are plenty of ways to use the word &#8220;love&#8221; casually and in conversation, without argument from any given\u00a0 reasonable person. Or even from me. :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Among the valued newcomers to RAMH&#8216;s roll of occasional commenters, you may have encountered one &#8220;Ashleigh Burrows.&#8221; (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&#8217;s an eponym for a pseudonym, and how many [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38,247,37],"tags":[215,1995,1996,1997,1998,1999,2000],"class_list":{"0":"post-7910","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-backwards","7":"category-ruminations","8":"category-onlineworld","9":"tag-love","10":"tag-ashleigh-burrows","11":"tag-the-burrow","12":"tag-aeneas","13":"tag-dido","14":"tag-petrarch","15":"tag-laura","16":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-23A","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7910"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7911,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7910\/revisions\/7911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}