So what is love, actually? Put simply, it is the intimate relationships we have with other people. Relationships so emotionally intense they can shape our will and our desires.
In physical love this intimacy is tangibly manifested in bodily contact of a sexual nature. Here the intensity is associated with erotic feelings, but affectionate lovers also share devotion, trust and a sense of belonging. Non-sexual intimacy can be just as sweeping and powerful. Just look at parents and children. Even parents of adult children retain a special mix of affection, pride, trust and protective instincts. We have similar relationships with our closest friends when love, friendship and respect blend into one, as in the Greek word philia, which translations of ancient texts render as “friendship” and as “love”.
In other words, love consists of emotions – intense and in the plural.
LOVE IS INSIDE US
Theoretically, a person’s inner self can be divided into three parts that enable us, respectively, to think, decide and feel. One part is cool and well-reasoned. Another is bold and inclined to act. Yet another is hot and emotional. Love is forged by our heat and our will to act. Blind passion plus brave choices.
We are directly motivated by what we love, whether seeking to protect it from external dangers or overcoming obstacles and separation. The highest levels of aggression, regardless of gender, arise when parents are prepared to kill to protect their child. The greatest hardship and torments we endure are those suffered while hoping to be reunited with a loved one.
Less conscious choices are often made when we react to love. A case in point was a young female patient of the Swiss psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger. She had become mute after her mother refused to let her meet with her love interest, a young officer in the navy. At the time, psychoanalysts were generally obliged not to interfere with the personal lives of their patients, but in this case Binswanger made an exception. He admitted the young woman for treatment in 1929. Wracked by bouts of convulsive hiccuping and hyperventilation, she had suddenly lost the power of speech. When he learned her seizures had begun after she was forbidden to see the man she was in love with, Binswanger chose to treat her silence as an unconscious decision to stop communicating with the world around her. Fortunately, her hiccuping and mutism were cured after Binswanger convinced her mother to let the young couple give their love a chance. Although physical, the young woman’s symptoms expressed something mental: an unconscious choice not to “swallow” – accept – her mother’s decision. During her seizures Binswanger performed very concrete interventions on her neck and throat, helping her to swallow. This also helped the mother to see the futility in forcing her daughter to choose between one kind of love (her mother) and another (a man). Incidentally, the young woman’s love for the officer did not last. Her affliction did not return, however, since the pressure of choosing had been removed.
A BALANCED SOUL
This division of a person into three parts was already proposed in ancient Greek philosophy, most notably by Plato, who situated love firmly within and outside the person. He linked a person’s abilities with their endeavours; internal workings with external works. Just as love must be lived by having the three parts of a person form an alliance, he wrote, people together must produce the ideal state, which consists of separate classes corresponding to reason, courage, and appetite. Only by combining a just state and a balanced soul can humankind achieve the highest truth, the greatest good and absolute beauty. Here, too, human happiness is regarded as an alliance of three elements: truth as the ideal of reason, goodness as the ideal of will, and beauty as the ideal of human emotions. We will look more closely at this last element in one of Plato’s dialogues, his preferred format when writing philosophy. Symposium, “the drinking party”, is one of Western culture’s most important texts about the nature of love, at least the type of love Plato calls eros (which, when capitalised, refers to the Greek deity of love).
Like Plato in antiquity, we too must approach love in its entirety, prepared for views of vast landscapes where much more than feelings grow. Today we still see love as reaching beyond emotional attachments and the arts, moving into the field of what is good or beneficial, just as Plato pointed out. The fact is, love is much more than a personal emotion or a central theme in art and entertainment. Love is also our salient relationships with other people, built on trust and acceptance. This makes love a driving force not only in creating bonds between people but also in enabling conversations and a sense of community to arise at all.
YOU’RE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR ROSE
We often say love works in mysterious ways, not always comprehending why people choose one partner over another. But whether, in choosing, we commit ourselves body and soul or only touch each other’s lives briefly, such meetings bring consequences and responsibilities. The emotional involvement and the motivated interpersonal bonds are always relevant in an ethical sense.
Consider a teenager uncertain of how to prioritise friends, school, work and sports activities. Not just anyone can step in with support. Parents are obligated and must advise and understand, and they do so in a way no one else can. Not necessarily because all parents know their own teenager best, but because they are the ones who love their child most. Conversely, children will dare to openly lean on those who love them most. Humans reciprocate love with trust and love, which in turn lays the mind open to happiness – and to sadness.
For couples, love also means daring to meet trust with trust. Daring to love and be loved. Trusting we will not be rejected when revealing our mind to the other. Love makes us responsible for those to whom we bind ourselves with ties of love, and who rely on our devotion and our care. As the philosophical fox explains in The Little Prince, a whimsical tale by the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry published during World War II: “You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.”
SEEING WITH THE HEART
Love is an important part of lived human life. This makes it a precious element in our lives we can either nurture or neglect. It takes repeated, wilful acts to benefit the object of our love. As many couples realise after spending several years together, it takes work to make love work, and our reinventions of love give sustenance to the choice we originally made with our heart.
The point is that in love we see and understand with our hearts. By seating love in the heart rather than the brain, we illustrate that loving can be well-founded even though our reasoning may seem baffling. More precisely, we stop reasoning before we’ve even begun. We stop, convinced that the reason is our beloved. We didn’t specifically choose him because he is tall, kind-hearted, smart, or organised, and that’s not why we stay with him. Then again, had he not been smart and kind, we might not have noticed him in the first place, so a partner’s qualities do help form our perception of them.
If someone asks us to, we can easily explain things like how well our partner’s practical, sensible approach to life complements