What's LOVE Got to do With It?

Bianca: There's a difference between like and love. Because, I like my Skechers, but I love my Prada backpack.  
Chastity: But I love my Skechers. 
Bianca:  That's because you don't have a Prada backpack.

- 10 Things I Hate About You

 
Lately, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about love. 

I know, I know, SO atypical for a young single woman to be daydreaming about a rapturous, quixotic romantic fantasy. 

Except, not exactly.  No, I’ve never been in love with another person, but upon further thought, I still know love in its myriad alternate forms.  I love my family.  I love my friends.  I love my cutie roommate.  I love America.  But I also love France.  I love Chris Evans and Ewan McGregor.  I love cake.  I’ve been loved by others – my parents, my siblings, my college friends, my grandparents.  And I’ve been an observer to love – in my own family, between strangers at the airport, in the skewed and unrealistic portrayals in movies.  When referencing "love," perhaps the most immediately thought-of ideal is that indescribably profound and tender passionate affection or attachment between two significant others...and yet, romantic love is only a sliver of this intriguing emotion? ability? feeling?, leading me to ruminate on it more holistically, as inspired by literature.  

It is one of my 2015 goals to read "Anna Karenina."  Or, at least, to start reading it.  Which I (*ahem*) have yet to do.  So, no, I'm not quite there yet, but I did watch the movie again just recently.  A fan of Joe Wright’s films to begin with, this movie captivates me with its haunting soundtrack, the fluidity of the cinematography, the luscious costuming, and the playful ploy of making a movie set as a play that’s also kind of a dance.  But underneath the spectacle of the movie-making is an exploration of all these different types of love.  Love of a mother for her son; love between a brother and a sister; love of a woman for her husband who has since moved on to other trifling frivolities; unrequited love; illicit love; a loveless marriage; and lastly, a mutual love between husband and wife.  

“Why do they call it love?” “Because it’s love.” 

- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Obviously these aren’t the only types of love.  There’s altruism. Religious love.  Love between people and pets.   The type of love where you’re talking to a guy friend on the phone and you finish your conversation with “K, love you, bye!” out of habit, becuase that's what you say to your mom on the phone when you talk with her, only to realize afterwards that you just told a guy you loved him by accident but it’s not really an accident because you do love him as a person, a friend, and someone who will laugh at your corny jokes, but you’re not, like, IN LOVE with him.

  

I recently finished reading the book, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” Though definitely not a favorite of mine, and one I probably won’t ever read again, it referenced Anna Karenina repeatedly and similarly presented a multitude of scenarios depicting the different types of love - between husband and wife, master and mistress, love triangles between master, mistress, and wife, and unconditional love between a woman and her dog.  The story deftly explored the complex tensions between love and lust, love and apathy, selflessness and selfishness.  

"Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.  Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company."

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

And then, because apparently I'm a glutton, I also read, "A Natural History of Love," by Diane Ackerman, quite the undertaking if I've ever heard one.  Love has always existed - how do you chronicle its history?  "When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor.  What we call 'white' is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space.  The prism sets them free.  Love is the white light of emotion.  It includes many feelings which, out of laziness and confusion, we crowd into one simple word...When art separates this thick tangle of feelings, love bares its bones.  But it cannot be measured or mapped.  Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one can agree on what it is." 

The entire concept of love is simultaneously so comprehensive and yet specific, in not only its varied forms but for which individuals it is felt.  Like other intangible embodiments of truth, love supersedes language and defies adequate description.  There are so many times I struggle with my own words, unable to condense an abstract idea into the finite constructs of vowels and consonants, frustrated by my ineptitude when I’m searching for a word that doesn't exist to convey what I mean, and I continually come up short. 

My sister once pointed out to me that a possible explanation for this struggle was that maybe English wasn’t my native language.  Sure, I speak English on the daily right now, but if we are eternal beings who existed before this life and will exist after, what are the chances that we spoke and will speak English forever and ever, a confusing and imperfect man-made means of communication? What if English is only a temporary, albeit faulty, solution for the here and now?

“Love.  What a small word we use for an idea so immense and powerful it has altered the flow of history, calmed monsters, kindled works of art, cheered the forlorn, turned tough guys to mush, consoled the enslaved, driven strong women mad, glorified the humble, fueled national scandals, bankrupted robber barons, and made mincemeat of kings.  How can love’s spaciousness be conveyed in the narrow confines of one syllable?  We use the word love in such a sloppy way that it can mean almost nothing or absolutely everything…Without a supple vocabulary, we can’t even talk or think about it directly.  On the other hand, we have many sharp verbs for the ways in which human beings can hurt one another, dozens of verbs for the subtle gradations of hate.  But there are pitifully few synonyms for love.  Our vocabulary of love and lovemaking is so paltry that a poet has to choose among clichés, profanities, or euphemisms…People everywhere and everywhen understand the phenomenon of love, just as they understand the appeal of music, finding it deeply meaningful even if they cannot explain exactly what that meaning is.”  

 - Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love

When I often find myself in the rabbit hole of self-assessment, one of the qualities about myself I uselessly fret over is my potential capacity to unconditionally love another person, whether a spouse or a child.  What if my husband sometimes has bad hair or wears dorky sandals - will I still love him then?  What if  When my children, should I ever have them, turn out to be super loud and annoying and won't sit still and spill their oatmeal all over the floor - will I still love them then?  

If I can't guarantee for certain that I can ever feel this way about not just one other person but multiple people, am I too brazen and full of hubris to expect someone to offer me a sentiment of which I might not even be capable of offering? What about this person I anticipate will be my husband? What about when he sees me super sweaty after exercising? Or with wet, slicked-back hair in the pool? Or when I embarrass him in public for eating four corn dogs in a row at our neighborhood barbeque - will he still love me then?

I realize how all this worrying is pointless and unproductive.  Especially when I take an appraising look at my real heart, smushed into a corner behind the heaps of other irrelevant and inconsequential worries about the future and think about how I feel, right here and right now, about the people that matter most to me.  About how I care so so so SO much about my nephews and soon-to-be nieceS that my heart just might pop out of my chest and explode all over the floor.  They'll probably never know how much I love them and how proud I am of their advancements and their ability to say my entire name, and they will grow up to be awkward, surly teenagers who will know me as the goofy aunt with lots of cats who always has cookies and we won't know what to talk about at family game nights, but that doesn't matter.  I don't love them on the contingency that they return my affection a commensurate, if not greater, amount - I love them because they are and I do.  I think about how I look up to and venerate the incomparably strong women in my life with so much respect and adoration that I want to emulate them in all I do.  I think about what joy it gives me to do something for someone else, to help out a person who needs an extra bit of attention or assistance.  I think about how my feelings for people are in no way diminished or invalidated because they have different opinions or beliefs from my own. 

There are no benchmarks or parameters to measure the legitimacy or extent of your love for another person, or even their love for you, especially because we all receive and exhibit love so differently.  And while it may be unrealistic to expect unconditional love from myself (or anyone else, for that matter), this love, what I'm able to offer right now, is enough.  It's all I have, and it is plenty.