16 - Love 2

All you need is LOVE     (2)

1.2 – Visual example of a kind of love in action

 

Still some possible actions of love (in a very wide sense) that you may practice in everyday life. 

2.2 – Another two flashlights on love 

 

We are never so defenseless against suffering 

as when we love. 

Sigmund Freud 

Pleasure of love lasts but a moment. 

Pain of love lasts a lifetime. 

Bette Davies 

 

3.2 – One more question 

• What do you do for love?

 

… 

And so I fall in love just a little ol' little bit 

Every day with someone new 

I fall in love just a little ol' little bit every day with someone new 

I fall in love just a little ol' little bit every day with someone new 

… 

This song goes about a love-strategy which is only apt and sustainable for the young and beautiful or for the very rich with plenty of time and money at their hands. This love-strategy is called “poly amorousity”, which means that you love different people at the (nearly) same time and that you’re not into monogamy, at least not at this moment. In the lives of the majority of people in Western societies a kind of hidden polyamor is practised by having lovers on the side, or another more “legal” kind of polyamor is the already common practice of “serial monogamy”, where people get married, get divorced, get married again, get divorced again, get divorced once again and so on. The marrying-divorcing-getting married again pattern of behavior shows that hope is most of the time stronger than experience, and that's why people step into the same tar pit over and over again. Cosas de la vida!

Real polyamor can make life somehow more exciting but also a lot more complicated and it is clearly not for the faint of heart. If you want to live this kind of life you should check first with your mediacal doctor.

 Rule of thumb # 17:

 

Given the absence of mind-reading technology, 

humans believe monogamy is possible. 

Matt Haig 

The Humans 

 8 - Forms or types of love

In the best of all worlds human beings ascend to life by the process of so called acts of love making, and they will be loved and cared for once they arrived on planet earth. Without love, which means actions of care, attention and physical and emotional presence from other human beings, the small newcomers won’t even survive for a day. 

 Maternal love is in general the first type of love that you will experience and it will be the blueprint for your intimate relations later in life. The maternal love is the first and only unconditional love you will get until you reach the age of one and a half to two years, when you will be trained (operant conditioning) to use the toilet and you are not allowed to pee and poop every- and anywhere anymore, and from now on your parents won’t like it when you use your crap to paint abstract signs on the walls of the living room. Real life starts when unconditional love finishes. 

As already mentioned, living with and being dependend on somebody who cares 24/7 for you during a few years gives you the first practical experience of what love is and defines your attachment style for the rest of your life (at least that’s what Psychoanalysts write!). You don’t remember your first practical experiences of attachment, dependence and love, and you are not conscious about them even as an adult, until some profound problems emerge in your relationships and you realize that something in your emotional life isn’t quite as you wanted and expected it to be. So, what to do? 

Learning how to love by deconstucting the large concept of "Love", dividing it into its smaller elements. According to psychologist Robert Sternberg, there are three important basic elements which, in different quantities, make up the various forms of love. Here the three "elements": 

 1 - Passion (in general has a short shelf life). 

 2 - Commitment (you know that somebody is commited or not when things get a bit rough and s/he doesn’t run away immediately).

 3 - Intimacy (the toughest element for most humans, since it is composed of trust and closeness, which our brain doesn’t give to others that easily – trust is something that needs a long time to grow and flourish, but can vanish in a view seconds, as a result of some infortunate comment or action!). 

 Starting with maternal love, he describes different kinds of love that may exist in more or less intimate relationships. 

Here I resume in a few sentences the kind of theoretical construction of Sternberg so that you can find out where you are on the meandering path to the Lalaland of everlasting love: 

• Infatuation – “love at first sight” (plenty of passion), but according to Sternberg it lacks commitment and intimacy (exactly the two “things” that will kill Infatuation on the spot). 

• Empty love – commitment should exist, but the relationship lacks intimacy and passion (I wouldn’t say that “empty love” is love at all, but maybe it’s the default program of long lasting attachment in modern societies). 

• Romantic love – intimacy and passion should exist, but the element of commitment is lacking (once commitment is officially reached and registered the romance is flying out of the window). 

• Companionate love – intimacy and commitment exist, but the relationship lacks passion (in general the result of habitude in long-term relations. Humans get used to nearly everything – for good and bad alike). 

• Fatuous love – passion driven with atoms of commitment and an evident lack of intimacy. 

• Consummate love – in theory the “ideal” type of relationship that involves all three elements (intimacy, passion, and commitment) and people in this type of love live together happily forever and ever and some days (mostly described in fairytales and shown in Bolly- or Hollywood movies). It’s more an “ideal fantasy” that is generated in psycho babble and other feel-good sermons, but in real life it is as hard to find as Unicorns (probably there are more Unicorns than Consymmate love relationships!). 

• Friendship – this type involves closeness to another person (intimacy), but there is no strong commitment or passion (again, there are types and types of friendship, some with commitment and some without, it all depends on each individual case!). 

• Others (your definitions): … 

Another reflection on the relation of language and reality: 

 There is only one word for love, 

but in real each love relation is different 

from another one! 

  

When the love of your life has reached the end of its journey to nowhere, and your lover is gone forever, your memroy may still linger on her or him, but you know that you have survived the breakup and you moved on when you can say and really wish, despite or because of your once broken heart: 

… 

I wonder what you're doing now 

I hope you're feeling happy now

I wonder what you're doing now 

I hope you're feeling happy now 

 Love, as a subtle but explosive form of energy, changes its shape over time, but can’t be destroyed, it transformes itself with and in you and you can transfer it somehow onto other “objects”, but for some people this process is more difficult than for others. 

 In cases when your memory lingers on too long, knowing and applying the core buddhist principle should help, in love as in life itself as well, but it’s easier said than done. Especially when you remember that Buddha was a kind of wandering monk and a renunciate of real life and so for him it was easy to “let go”, since, as the Bob Dylan song goes: “When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose”. 

Letting go of your former life, when you have three kids, a big house, cars, debts and a well paying job is somehow more difficult to nearly impossible. So always keep in mind your social environment and your special circunstances when you hear the so called “wisdom” from long time dead sages who didn’t have any responsibilities in life nor commitments with other people. 

The sages of long forgotten times were, in their psychological outfit (no attachment – no feelings – no responsibilities), and statistically spoken, nearer to a modern psycho- or sociopath or to people with an autistic spectrum disorder than to a so called normal neurotic and nearly productive citizen of todays society. But still it’s useful to practice the core Buddhist principle sometimes, especially when love and life suck all too much: 

Let go, 

Walk on. 

9 - Shadow sides of love 

In the German language there is a nice play on words for jealousy which can’t be translated as such, but still looks good in latin script: 

Eifersucht     ist eine    Leidenschaft,   die mit

Eifer   sucht,      was   Leiden   schafft. 

Approx. Translation: 

 Jealousy is a passion that seeks 

with zeal all that which causes suffering. 

Jealousy: happens when you want to protect what you think belongs to you or is yours. The impression that something or somebody belongs to you may based on reality or may be a delusion, but the results in both cases can be quite serious 

Hate: People can hate other people they don’t even know and don’t have any contact with, but also they can hate somebody they lived together with for far too long and they couldn’t go seperate ways for some reason or another. 

Breakup, the unwanted end: The unquestioned and unquestioning admiration for the object of our desires will not last indefinitely. Nor the madness that characterized the beginning phases of delusional passion. Over time, when we start to think more or less clearly again, we ask ourselves: What did I do? How could I be so stupid! 

These questions are the result of the experience of living together with your lover, where you may realize for the first time and only after a while, that your charming prince has smelly feet, sweaty hands and when he exhales it remembers you of the odor of a Camenbert de Normandie forgotten in a cupboard for three years. And you may wonder: “I once loved this man, and he must have some positive qualities! But which are they, I can’t see them anymore!” And so reality creeps into the fantasies of eternal love and eternity ends after a few months or a few years of living together. Even eternal love is nowadays a bit shorter than it was in the past! 

 Other shadow sides of love (your turn): … 

 Remember:

 The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion 

is that the caprice lasts a little longer. 

Oscar Wilde

 

What the process of living and loving in modern life with all too real people may teach you: 

… 

Oh love it comes and goes 

but no one never tells you how to learn to let go 

different people, they walk different roads 

some of them will hurt you 

 but some of them won't 

… 

10 – How to increase your love currency

In general, being young (around 18 to not much over 30), beautiful or handsome and healthy helps a lot and is enough to fall in love and out of it several times in the process and being loved in return. If you haven’t got any of these, that doesn’t mean that love is impossible, it only shows quite obviously that you haven’t got the best hand of cards in the game of love. But some people even win card games like poker with a bad hand, so love, like a lot of other strategic games, can be won with acts of make believe and undercover betrayal. You have to play the game of life and love with the cards you’ve got, but you may cheat a little. 

For example, things that can pass in a game of cards or any kind of game: 

Joe and Fritz playing cards and ... 

• Joe: Fritz, you are cheating! 
• Fritz: Yes, I know! 

But despair not, in the game of love, appearence is (nearly) everything, but you can change easily the vision of other people, even without the help of an ophthalmologist or the intervention of plastic surgery. The fact is that every million of dollars you own makes you ten years younger, more beautiful or handsome and you seem far more intelligent too. If you are - like me - old, poor, ill and ugly, then falling newly in love with a real existant person isn’t the most sustainable option for you and me. That means we have to attach to other “objects” of sublimated love, like poetry, music, platonic friends, pets, hobbies, chocolate, cheese cakes, beer, etc. 99-Your choice: … 

Rule of thumb # 18:

Better being rich, young, healthy and beautiful 

than being poor, old, sick and ugly! 

Coluche 

(French comedian) 

11 – Some examples of how the word “love” is evoked in literature and/or in real life 

• I wonder why the simple truths are the most difficult to understand? Had I understood at the time that the first requirement of love is strength, events would most likely have taken a different turn. But to be strong you must have self-respect; and to have self-respect you must have self-knowledge, must know yourself inside out, even the most hidden things, those most difficult to accept. How can one achieve this when life with all its noise and bustle is always dragging one forward? 

Susanna Tamaro 

Follow Your Heart 

•  With that torrent of hair which every man had to dip his hands into. You with whom no man who saw you could help but fall in love. What do I mean, fall in love! Fall prey. And not only every man, many women, too. Marpessa among them I believe, when she came out of exile and never looked at a man again. Even ‘fall prey’ is too feeble a term for the frenzy of love, the madness, that gripped many a man, including Achilles the brute – and without your doing anything to cause it, that one must concede … Polyxena. 

•  Ah, Polyxena. The way you used to move. Brisk and impetuous, at the same time graceful. The way a priestess is not supposed to move. 

Christa Wolf 

Cassandra 

• She had long ago ceased to love Andrew, her husband, and increasingly wondered whatever she had seen in him. She had married him because he had seemed kind and reliable, in complete contrast to her father, who was addicted to gambling. But David, although in the same profession as Andrew, was different. 

• He was also, it was obvious, attracted to Annabel. Secretly they began an affair, and Annabel fell deeply in love with David. She could not stop thinking about him night and day, … 

•  In the end, however, her obsession gave her the strength to tell Andrew she wanted to leave him, and there was an extremely bitter divorce. She married David, and the two of them set up home not far from their previous homes. David’s wife was shattered, and forbade him access to their daughter. 
•  
• When confronted with the reality of living together, the obsession petered out. After eight years the relationship has soured and love has gone. Annabel now wants to divorce David, but feels uneasy about having two failed marriages. Also, after putting all her energies into falling in love and setting up home with David she still does not have a career; she feels her hopes of being financially self-sufficient are slimmer now than ever. 

• The overwhelming love she had for David has turned to hate. She feels she fell in love with an illusion, with a fantasy, rather than the real man. When she got to know the real man, she didn’t like him so much. 

Liz Hodgkinson 

Obsessive Love 

•  A couple of days after the bad news we drove with the boys from our home in the east of Cornwall to the seaside town of St Ives in the west. We sat watching the breakers crashing onto the sands of Porthmeor beach. We swam, we ate fresh fish at the Seafood Café, and we enjoyed the sun. It was a good time, a pocket of love and warmth. There was a shared, unspoken feeling of whatever happens, happens, but here, now, at this time, life is good. 

Paul Broks 

The Darker the Night, … 

•  Semrad taught us that most human suffering is related to love and loss and that the job of therapists is to help people “acknowledge, experience, and bear” the reality of life—with all its pleasures and heartbreak. “The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves,” he’d say, urging us to be honest with ourselves about every facet of our experience. He often said that people can never get better without knowing what they know and feeling what they feel. … 

• Healing, he told us, depends on experiential knowledge: You can be fully in charge of your life only if you can acknowledge the reality of your body, in all its visceral dimensions. 

Bessel van der Kolk 

The Body Keeps the Score 

 

 12 – Coda

• Interpretation: I like that very, very much. It’s wonderful! 

• Mission: Attachment, Care of somebody other than yourself. 

• Duration: Good question – Life (and love) will tell! 

• Shadow: Jealousy. 

• Force: Irresistible attraction towards another human mammal. 

• Energy: too high and strong at the beginning, but tends to go dowm more or less fast, and in general steadily (entropy in cooperation with time will do the job!).

 

Beaing able to say, at the end of a love or of life itself: 

No, je ne regrette rien,

 … 

 is something few humans will accomplish. The completely unconscious ones and the ones who are conscious of the fact that life is full of uncertainty and there ain’t perfect solutions for anything. 

PS: A love relationship and the following marriage between a woman and a man show without any doubt (the so called ultimate proof – if ever there was one) that men are a lot less intelligent than women: 

 Men are undoubtedly more stupid than women. 

 Or have you ever heard of a woman marrying a man 

just because of his pretty legs? 

Micheline Presle 

(French actress)