What is love?
The experience of love varies from one relationship to another. This is
because the love we feel for our parents is certainly different from what we feel for
our spouse or for humanity in general. The Greeks classify the nature of love into
three: Agape, which refers to the love of God for man and vice versa, with the
inclusion of brotherly love for all humanity; philia, is the affection or appreciation for
another, as in friendship or love for family; and lastly, the concern of this paper,
Eros, which constitutes an intense desire (referred to as sexual) for somebody. Eros
has had many names over the years: sexual love, personal love, couple love and
romantic love, to name a few. Throughout the paper, I refer to it as Romantic love
understood as the form of love between individuals that may precede and lead to
long-term intimate relationships such as marriage. The two individuals who willingly
participate in such a relationship both act as the lover and the beloved. But what is
the nature of love in such a relationship? In this paper, I argue that love is the desire
to be united with the beloved in such a way that individual autonomy is not limited
but becomes crucial to the continued existence of the union.
It was Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium who spoke of the origin of human
love through the myth of three sexes in one body: male, female and androgynous.
‘It’ attempted to overthrow the gods so Zeus decided to teach ‘it’ a lesson of
humility--- he cut the body in half. This, Aristophanes explains, is the birth of human
love. “So ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our
original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.” It suggests that
man is not complete in himself; he continuously seeks for that which he lacks and
this pursuit of wholeness is called love. Weakened by division, we are ‘healed’, that
is, strengthened by union. The same concept is explained with what psychiatrists
call ego boundaries. Basically, as infants we have no concept of our own identity.
But as we grow older we become aware of who we are and who we are not, of our
body and the limits of our body. “The knowledge of these limits inside our minds is
what is meant by ego boundaries.” The more our individuality is defined by these
boundaries, the more we feel painfully lonely because we are isolated from others
by their individual identities. Some people, called Schizoids, are comfortable in their
loneliness but for the rest of us, we want to break through these walls and feel
unified with the outside world. “The essence of the phenomenon of falling in love is
a sudden collapse of a section of an individual’s ego boundaries, permitting one to
merge his or her identity with that of another person.” And in doing so, reminiscent
of the time in our mother’s womb, we feel perfectly safe, secure and more powerful
because now we are not alone in our problems. Therefore, love springs from our
need to share, that is to say ‘extend’, ourselves to the beloved in our pursuit for
wholeness and ultimately for empowerment.
Love, however doesn’t stop there for if it does in so far as you (your well-
being, your interests) are empowered, you will continue to love. In the event that
your interests are no longer served and you are no longer pleased, you stop loving.
That is not the case. By uniting with the beloved, each becomes part of the other’s
identity. Robert Nozick explains that “Romantic love, is wanting to form a ‘we’ with
a particular person.” The ‘we’ is a new entity (wholeness), produced by “two
persons flowing together and intensely merging.” The individual identities become
united in such a way that there is an enlarged third identity, the ‘we’, so intimate
that “your own well-being is tied up with that of someone you love” even to the
extent that you “act in a way that limits your autonomy.” To a point, I agree.
Anything that harms the beloved is harmful to the lover. If your girlfriend/boyfriend
suddenly dies, of course you will be devastated. If your wife is pregnant and you
need to work two jobs to support her, you will get another job even if you don’t
want to. What I disagree with is the equation of your well-being with the beloved’s
well-being because by the existence of the ‘we’, the lovers’ concern must be the
well-being of the ‘we,’ of the joint identity while maintaining an independent
identity. But what does it mean to share an identity, anyway? It certainly doesn’t
mean liking everything he/she likes or spending every minute of the day by his/her
side. Not every decision you make concerns the beloved, for example the decision
to buy a book or watch a movie. The decisions that do concern the beloved are
those that involve consequences for which both of you are affected, like your choice
of career or when and where to procreate. In making these kinds of choices, you do
not act by your own reasons but by the reasons of the ‘we,’ you in relation with the
beloved. By uniting your identity with another, your personal identity doesn’t
dissolve. In fact, your independence as an individual identity is essential in the
“mingling of what were once individual ends into a common pool that each,
simultaneously, sees as his or her own.” Andrea Westlund calls this a “joint practical
perspective” in which the couple shares an identity in sharing ends, interests, and
reasons. Moreover, this pool, the ‘we’, shouldn’t be seen as a definite list of ends or
goals. It’s something that the individuals add to, an on-going process of
strengthening the ‘we’ as intimacy grows in the relationship. Therefore, love is the
desire to form a ‘we’ of joint interests and reasons with the general goal of sharing
your life (for however long or short) with one another.
Joint interests seem to be either agreements of similar interests or
compromises between contradictory interests. This suggests that actualizing the
‘we’ doesn’t gratify either individual completely. The pursuit of wholeness, then, is
not equal to the pursuit of pleasure. Being in a relationship is just as much filled
with pleasure as it is with pain. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices for the well-
being of the ‘we,’ like choosing your family over a career. It is only when one cannot
distinguish oneself from the ‘we’ (lose self-identity) nor recognize oneself as a
participant in the ‘we’ (lose partaking of) that the relationship collapses. So, what
keeps relationships together, then? What keeps people from leaving the ‘we’ (1) in
order to gratify the “I” somewhere else or to form a better ‘we’ (2) with another? I
suppose we all have different reasons for staying in a relationship. The common
denominator, I think, is in how we choose our beloved. Although it is natural for us
to want to form a union with another person, we don’t fall in love with the first
attractive person we see. In fact, we don’t even know we lack something until we
see what it is we lack. We choose to love a person because of his/her qualities
(physical or otherwise) that are close to, if not exactly, what we long for. The
beloved, then, can’t be just anybody and thus, not easily dispensable. We stay
because the beloved is worth staying for. And so, romantic love is the yearning for a
gap to be filled permanently by the beloved in the formation of the ‘we’ without
losing either self-identity. #
Bibliography
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