Speculations concerning the idea of Love and Love.

When I feel joy I feel closest to truth.

Perhaps it’s vital to make a distinction between the thing and the idea of that thing. Between an idea and the abstraction of that idea. Between you and the idea of you. Between the essence of these words and what they mean to you.

When it comes to love, discerning between the idea of love and love itself is a painfully beautiful process. For one, it seems almost implausible to put in words what Love means to anyone. It seems to be a radically subjective facility. We are often introduced to someone else’s idea of love and we, rightfully so, decide to embrace it as what it ought to mean. But what does it really mean?

What we need to decide for ourselves is whether we want to imitate the idea of love shared by years of people talking about it OR do we want to investigate what it means for ourselves.

We’ve lived through years of love songs, novels, movies, books, podcasts, tv shows, and other mediums that talk about love and how paradoxical it is in our lives. Some of us like to limit it down to electrochemical reactions occurring in our brains. All of these create a primer for our understanding of what love ought to mean. Flush it down the toilet. Consuming some kind of media should not change your entire belief system, it should add perspective to your own version of the experience.

Speculation:

Maybe love isn’t about falling in love with someone or something. It might be more grounding then we give it credit. What if we decide to create love with someone or something that we like and step into love together instead of falling in it. More importantly, we ought to not think that we can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Most of our heartbreak comes from attempting to name who or what we love and the way we love. Because when we use socially constructed ideas about love, we end up setting ourselves up for failure. But we can never really know in the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. The disappointment takes birth when we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation before the revelation has flowered completely. Then we perceive our experience of love with grief and it becomes an unrecognizable form of affection.

“We name mostly in order to control but what is worth loving does not want to be held within the bounds of too narrow a calling. In many ways love has already named us before we can even begin to speak back to it.” — David Whyte

Easier said than done: love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only with what you are expecting to give — which is everything.

Love is about growing up. It does not begin and end in the way we seem to think it does at all. Love is the very difficult understanding that something other than yourself is real.

In any way, perhaps the most important tenant of love is the relationship you have with yourself. We won’t know how to love or be loved until we love ourselves.

Almost everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, scared, and yet designed for joy. Even (or especially) people who seem to have it more or less together are more like the rest of us than you would believe. I try not to compare my insides to their outsides, because this makes me much worse than I already am, and if I get to know them, they turn out to have plenty of irritability and shadow of their own. Besides, those few people who aren’t a mess are probably good for about twenty minutes of dinner conversation.

This is good news, that almost everyone is petty, narcissistic, secretly insecure, and in it for themselves, because a few of the funny ones may actually long to be friends with you and me. They can be real with us, the greatest relief.

As we develop love, appreciation, and forgiveness for others over time, we may accidentally develop those things toward ourselves, too.

Anne Lamott

This entire article is a work in progress, it is a series of ongoing speculations, this is the first of many.

Cheers. Happy Valentine's day?