The term ‘love’ is in need of a re-definition.
The romanticism & Disneyfication of love are destined to lead us down a one way path of doom & dismay.
Love is not the intense array of feelings you get when somebody first catches your eye, nor is it the abnormally elevated levels of dopamine, serotonin & oxytocin you experience in the first few months of dating somebody. Love is a deeper (& frankly not so seductive) term when analysed more critically.
My definition is one I urge you to contemplate, if not adopt:
Love: To suffer undeterred.
We are woefully inept when it comes to love in its most common form. Even with the best of intentions we fail miserably. Whether it is loving another individual, loving a particular activity, loving a pet, loving your country or community, we often miss the mark. Vowing to do better next time, we rarely ever do. The cycle repeats, on & on.
This is of course outer-directed love – love aimed at another person or thing. Which begs a deeper question: Can one love at all without first loving themselves?
To place someone else before yourself, to meet someone else’s needs before your own, or to nourish another individual without nourishing yourself will only be to your own eventual detriment. It also signifies an underlying level of neediness – a trait that is painfully anti-seductive.
Telling someone to love themselves can be problematic if an individual is already highly narcissistic. Though we all possess a degree of narcissism, it can, & does, transgress into a malevolent trait that finds itself sitting in the ‘dark triad’ personality traits (psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellian).
We all have an ego & we all love to have our ego caressed by others, whether that be through praise, adulation or love. Whilst it is true that we all hold this capacity for narcissism – most do not allow this potential to overstep & corrupt our psyches.
Those whom we interact with in our daily lives share the same proclivities & have an ego just like we do. They want to be seen & heard & valued. They want to be loved &, if they are a healthy individual, they will want to give love too.
What you put into the world has a funny way of rippling out before returning full circle, all the way back to you. Some people call this karma. I tend to think that the energy you hold within you, the energy that shapes your behaviour & the same energy that you put into the world around you resonates with the people & places you inhabit. This energy, either positive or negative, is returned back to you in the same manner.
Reality is neutral. Whether you choose the energy of love or hate, anger or peace, you can expect to see the world echoed back to you in the same light.
Love, love, love. We each want to receive it, we each want to give it, & yet we seem to spend so much time running away from it!
Love can be damaging of course. When received from outside of ourselves & then taken away suddenly, we will feel pain & loss & heartache. If you have ever loved someone of something then you probably understand this feeling. Love has caused more damage than hate ever will… it’s no wonder people run away from it.
I want to bring us away from the idealization, or romanticisation of outwardly facing love that we so readily consume in the Western world. We see it in our films, on our TV, in our music & in our books. Everywhere we go we are bombarded with love.
The term ‘love’ has been hijacked & fetishised today. It has a malevolent taint to it. It is to be consumed rather than embodied. Love is an energy. It exists in abundance & is omnipresent. It doesn’t live inside someone else &, no matter how much our society ties to convince us that it does, it is up to us to feel love. It can come in communion with another person, but it is not from them per se. Love is embodied, it is lived. Yet, as stated earlier, it is not the simple expression of elevated chemicals in the brain.
Love is to suffer undeterred.
In relationships with others, relationships where we so viscerally embody the emotions of ‘love’ (love in terms of an amplification of feelings), we will almost certainly encounter moments of distaste, disgust & even anger at our partner.
Why does our partner act in such a manner that triggers our emotional equilibrium? Why can’t they just behave in the way that we want them to, in a way that makes us happy & joyful of their presence?
To think this way is to be selfishly inconsiderate of others but moreover, is to be inconsiderate of life in general. The world does not & will not coincide with your feelings & internal desires no matter how much energy you exude in trying to manipulate things. You cannot control love, just as you cannot control life. You will inevitably struggle through each & every relationship you have, from your relationship with your partner, to the relationship with your friends, the relationship with yourself & ultimately your relationship with life.
The attempt to make others or to make life bend to your will, will inevitably backfire. You must bend. You must be flexible. You must be, as Bruce Lee said, “like water”. Again, this doesn’t mean you give up all autonomy or that you fail to look after yourself in the process of serving someone else – this was addressed above when it comes to neediness & a failure to value oneself. However, to be with someone – another human being who is full of faults & inadequacies – will certainly result in many moments of suffering.
Nevertheless, as our new definition states:
Love: To suffer undeterred.
Here is an example, removed from the domain of romantic relationship (the area that we commonly associate with the word ‘love’):
When going to the gym consistently, whether it is to maintain or improve our health, we do so with the understanding that it is one of the greatest behaviours we can undertake to improve our physical, mental & emotional wellbeing.
You will be aware if you have trained/exercised for a long enough period that, whilst you tend to feel better after a hard workout, the motivation to go to the gym or to workout is not always there – in fact, it’s rarely there at all!
To have the discipline to look after your body & your health whilst enduring the daily stresses & struggles of our busy modern lives is no small feat. Further, after years of training & working out, maintaining the drive & desire to go & workout consistently can be an equally precarious task. So often is the case, you will sit there feeling tired & unmotivated, contemplating going to the gym on the cold, wet morning of a British winter. You will have a poignant understanding of the difficulty & hardship you are about to undertake at the gym – something that if you were subjected to under any other circumstance you would outright refuse.
And yet, with the awareness of how you are benefiting yourself in each of the earlier stated domains, you choose to endure the workout.
You choose to suffer, undeterred.
Love does not need more romanticising. It does not need to be pedestalised in its current form as an unsustainable elevation of chemicals & emotions. It does not need to be outside of us, in the world of lust, sex & other people. It does not need more incessant consuming.
Love requires the acceptance of suffering & the willingness to continue on anyway.
To love is to suffer, undeterred.
What do you think?