Carefully reading the lyrics of pop songs can be a way of understanding how our society conceives of romantic love, since most of the Top 40 songs, the most popular of the pop, are concerned with it. Oddly, most of these songs don't seem to deal with genuine love, but with what might be considered caricatures of it.
For the last 80 or so years, by far the most prevalent love songs involve not requited love, but heartbreak. A miscellany also makes up a large category: angry quarrels, sexuality without love, and spoofs of love. Next in frequency comes infatuation: being head over heels about someone you hardly know, or don't know at all. The smallest category is requited love: satisfaction over being in a romantic relationship.
In the heartbreak songs, the intensity of the pain of loss (I'm no good without you; what's the use of living?) is assumed to be an indication of the depth of the love for the lost one. Yet it might be something entirely different, reflecting the inability of the lover to adequately deal with loss and grief. Similarly, the obsessive quality of infatuation may not be an indication of love at all, only the predilection of the lover for obsessive fantasies. Even the requited love songs are somewhat mechanical, with the loved one described abstractly (wonderful, beautiful, without compare, and so on), but little indication that she or he is a real person, with strengths and unique attributes.
If heartbreak, infatuation and abstract requited love are not genuine love, what is? This is not an easy question to answer, since scholars and ordinary citizens have been pondering it for thousands of years. Especially in English, the word love is extraordinarily ambiguous; unabridged dictionaries typically have about two dozen meanings, some contradicting each other.
My suggestion for a provisional definition involves three components. First, the core element in both romantic and family love can be seen as connectedness in its sociological sense. Two people have considerable understanding of each other, and they each understand that they understand, and are understood. This kind of recursive understanding, understanding that you are understood, is essential not only with respect to thoughts and beliefs, but even more importantly, with FEELINGS. Connection with each others' feelings seems to work even if there are problems with intellectual connection, but not the other way around.
Romantic love has two other components, sexual desire, and attachment. I needn't dwell on the meaning of sexual desire. Attachment is a physical reaction formed first in infancy, involuntary and universal in all mammals. It means that you miss someone when they are away or lost, even if you didn't like them. Family and love for friends attachment and connectedness.
Some of the many implications of this idea of genuine love are spelled out in my forthcoming book,
What's Love Got to Do with It? The Emotional/Relational World of Pop Songs. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers. One of the implications is that sexual attraction and or attachment are NEVER enough to form a secure love bond, connectedness is also necessary. The good news is that connections can be strengthened through time and effort.
This year I am teaching a course on pop songs at my university. My next blog will explain how the course is designed to give practical help to the students in their own lives, as well as introducing them to basic ideas in social science.
