HAVE WE LEARNED ANYTHING YET ABOUT LOVEADVICE FORM THE PROS
Ask for a definition of love and you'll get a hundred different
answers. We trekked to the library, to the movies, and telephoned
authors, activists, psychologists, or just the well-known who, in one way
or another, labor in the fields of love. Here's what they said about this
emotion so close to our hearts:
MIRROR, MIRROR...
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested
with so much of oneself It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries,
the possibility of torment.
-James Baldwin
KNEADING YOU
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like
bread; re-made all the time, made new.
-Ursula K. LeGuin
"I don't want to live - I want to love first, and live
incidentally."
-Zelda Fitzgerald
MANNERLY SPEAKING
When you're in love, you put up with things that, when you're out
of love, you cite.
-Miss Manners (Judith Martin)
NOT FOR THE WEAK
Most folks' attempts at love is an explosive mixture of narcissism
and emotional fusion, which is why many marriages blow up.
Love is not just something you feel. Love is the active process
of:
o fostering the development of the loved one,
o becoming guardian of their privacy,
o and self-soothing the vulnerabilities and disappointments
involved.
Often, we expect to "get something out of love" - rather than
approaching it as something you put yourself into. That's why most of us
aren't able to truly love someone (or love ourselves, for that matter).
It's a giving of oneself, but not a loss of self. People who can't stand
on their own two feet can't afford to love too well.
It's not that we're too stupid or emotionally incapable of loving-,
it's that we're not ready to pay the price of success. Loving is not for
the weak, it's not for kids. (Which is why there's so little of it in the
world.) Loving doesn't make you strong - you'd best be strong before you
start.
The end result of a long-term loving marriage is pain and grief on
a level that few of us are prepared to handle - that's why there are more
"bad" marriages than good ones. Most of us would rather live with "a pain
in the ass" than a pain in our heart. It's not the utilitarian or "bad"
marriages that are so hard to bear. It's the really good ones that break
your heart.
-David Schnarch, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychiatry
Louisiana State University
New Orleans, LA
DON'T BE STINGY
PSYCHOLOGY TODAY: Does love exist - yes or no?
Helen Gurley Brown, Editor, Cosmopolitan: What a dumb question...
does July come after January?
PT: What have you learned about love and its nature?
HGB: Everybody has tons of love inside him (her) if it doesn't get
squashed by early life experiences. Even then, it can often be coaxed
back again.
PT. Do you have any advice you'd like to pass on?
HGB: Don't be too choosy or stingy about whom or how often you
love.
CARDIAC ARREST
Oh lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast. -
Oh! press it to thine own again,
Where it will break at last.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
From "The Indian Serenade"
WELCOME IN THE UNIVERSE
Love is the effort to make yourself feel good by making other
people feel good too. Love is not just an emotion, but a set of
activities, the things you do to make life better for your loved ones.
The more people you can love the better you can feel. It feels good both
to love and to be loved. There is great integrity in loving, whether or
not you are loved in return, but there is wonderful security and comfort
in knowing that someone loves you too. If you love, you are welcome in
the universe; if you are loved, you are at home here.
There are many kinds of loving relationships, and perhaps the
mother-child bond is the prototype for all of them. The religions that
compare God's love for human kind to the father-child bond date from
previous millenia, before romance replaced love as the most cherished
emotional state.
Love, of course, has little to do with the "in-love" state of
temporary romantic insanity. Falling in love is an alternative to suicide
for people who can't keep living the life they are in, but are not quite
ready to die yet. Falling in love is a way of leaving your real life, and
all the real people in it, to pursue the fantasy of a life without depth
or the constraint of gravity. The in-love state is akin to acute mania,
and it is fueled not by loving emotions, but by anger, defiance, and
hatred. The destination of the in-love state is a liebestod of ecstatic
suicidal consumption at the point of orgasm-anything to avoid coming back
down into a mundane and messy reality. Falling in love is cruel, greedy,
and selfish.
Isn't it bizarre that we consider the high romance of the in-love
state to be the most sacred form of insanity? Even psychotherapists have
been known to respect it. Are we that afraid of the hard work and
frequently boring business of loving the other people in our
lives?
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