Concerning Love

One sign that a person has too much time on his hands is that he or she starts to worry obsessively about the nature of love. Ordinary people do not tend to think about this issue overly much. And yet it is a problem. In English, the word 'love' has an extraordinarily broad compass, ranging from Christian love (which can be described as love for one's neighbor, love for the poor and the oppressed, a love that is general and political) through love for one's friends, love for one's family, to love for one's inamorato or inamorata. It is only with respect to the last type of love that a sexual component is involved. This profound ambiguity in the meaning of the word 'love' presents a genuine problem. The concept of love has been integral to Western society for generations, to a culture where marriage is based on free choice rather than arrangement; furthermore the concept is the lynchpin of discourses ranging from religion to sexuality. Love is sometimes exalted as the highest good; sometimes, by contrast, it has been viewed as dirty and evil. (See my post "Concerning Kafka and Wilde" for a discussion of this.) In the contemporary Western world, love is just as problematic as it was in Wilde's day. (A good example of a contemporary film that  explores this problematic is "I Love You, Man".)

Perhaps the reason that the concept of 'love' is so complex and confused is that the word encompasses too many different types of phenomena. The ancient Greeks distinguished between four different types of love - agape, eros, philia and storge. Perhaps the English speaking world would be better served by discriminating between different types of love by using different words for the different attitudes people adopt towards each other. At the very least, we could discriminate between love that has a sexual dimension and love that does not. The issue, as ever, is one of language. Our terms are ambiguous and vague. How much confusion and conflict could we resolve if people found ways to use language more clearly and precisely, to find common ground with respect to words?

A issue related to the problematic surrounding the word 'love' is a confusion concerning the terms people use to characterize their relationships. It is quite common among many people on the left, at least in this country, for a person to describe his or her significant other as a 'partner'. I was once attending a coffee group, a group for people who were patients of the Mental Health System, where the Occupational Therapist present alluded in conversation to her "partner"; one of the young patients there asked her if she was a lesbian.  The poor OT  had no idea how to reply. The young patient explained that, where she came from, Hamilton, only gay people ever used the word "partner". The OT defended herself, as best she could, by saying that she preferred the word "partner" because it seemed more mature.

Now, personally, I dislike this use of the word "partner". There may be good grounds for using it from a Feminist perspective, in that employing this word avoids buying into the power relations historically implicit in gendered speech, but I prefer language that is transparent, that is gender specific: it seems to me more honest. For example, I prefer the words "boyfriend" and "girlfriend", immature though they may seem, because they specify the sex of the one referred to and because they indicate that the relationship is in the public domain. I tend to describe my father's current squeeze as his 'girlfriend', despite the fact that my father  is in his sixties, because it seems to better describe their relationship. The word "partner", by contrast, makes the relationship seem like a commercial arrangement.

Another anecdote that demonstrates how difficult issues of language can be with respect to relationships concerns a friend of mine who identifies sometimes as a lesbian and sometimes as bisexual.  This friend, despite being in a Civil Union with a woman some years older, recently acquired, with the full knowledge and consent of her partner, a male paramour. The word my friend used to describe her inamorato was "lover". Although I think very highly of my friend, use of the word 'lover' in this context put my teeth on edge. For two reasons. First, because it is again gender nonspecific and second, because of the ambiguity surrounding the word 'love' that I described earlier. Use of the word 'lover' in this context seems to cheapen the concept of love somehow; it seems to reduces all love to sex. The battle for Marriage Equality in recent years was based on the idea that Gay people can enter into committed monogamous relationships as much as Straight people can, that homosexual and heterosexual erotic love are of the same quality. My friend's story makes me wonder why we went to such lengths to fight for marriage reform. In my strange and admittedly quite poorly written post, "Me and Jon Stewart Part 3", I described Jon as "a lover" - my intention was not to say anything about sex but rather to suggest that he displayed the virtues of Christian love, a strange thing to say I admit of a Jewish atheist, but true nonetheless. Love and sex are often two separate things. It is possible to have sex without love and love without sex. But the battle for Gay marriage was a battle premised on the notion of love, on the the idea that erotic love, regardless of who it is between, is sacred.

Given these ambiguities and confusions surrounding the concept of "love", it may seem that a solution could be to follow the Greek model and have different words for different types of love. There may, however, be a reason why we use the same word to describe all these many different ways of orientating ourselves towards others. Perhaps all love contains an element of sublimated sexual desire, as Freud no doubt would say; or perhaps when we tell our beloved that we love her we are inviting her into our family. I don't know. I admit I may seem to contradict myself. I haven't resolved this issue in my own mind. But the question certainly deserves further investigation.

You might ask what my own attitude to love is. I would say that I don't fall in love easily. I think I try to follow the example set by Lou Reed in Venus in Furs, where he sings about "love not given lightly"; in fact, I was in a relationship and sleeping with my first girlfriend for several years before I told her that I loved her and, when I first did so, I did so accidentally. We broke up briefly as a result. All in all, I think it is better to profess love too little than too much; people who love excessively have, I think, significant issues. I think of the refrain from Fleetwood Mac's song Tusk: "Don't tell me that you love me. Just tell me that you want me."