Love Meditation 1 - October 28, 2024

How often love happens is a matter of how often two people actively choose each other, and upon choosing each other, how effectively they are able to persistently delude themselves into thinking that they are what we might conceptualize as “soulmates.” When people love each other, they are:

1. Enthusiastic: there is true respect, admiration and lust towards the love object.

2. Falsely confident: while it may be true, by some God’s-eye-view standard if such a thing exists, that there is another person in the world or in life that she is more suited for, she is completely convinced that she has found the person he’s “made for.”

3. Selfish: she demands the love of the love object, and while she maintains confidence in their bond, the mere thought of someone else serving as her object’s lover is undeniably disgusting.

Love is not guaranteed, especially in today’s culture. Perhaps the biggest cultural myth inhibiting people from pursuing love with more frequent success is the idea that such an act is, well, not an act, not a choice. This idea is discussed, albeit in a sense too sanitary for my liking, by bell hooks in her seminal book All About Love. Love is not something discovered, it is something decided, and it is a contract that extends beyond the individual human lifetime. Such a transcendent and dire situation is not one that simply occurs by chance.

Often, the same man who will not commit to his work, his home, or his family is the man who will not make the choice to love. He is terrified that the love will change him, or that the love will expose his vulnerabilities and in such render him weak. He approaches lovers as he does cars, trying to find the best/latest/special/most “him” model or brand. This man, so long as he entertains this offensive view of love, will never find it, and will in turn miss out on the only force that brings sense and fulfillment to this chaotic and fruitless world of ours. When a man views love as something painless, a thing to be optimized, a thing to be discovered, the love he experiences will be completely shallow, always fleeting, and if he nonetheless decides to halfheartedly commit to someone, mutually bitter and resentful.

Easily more cancerous to love than the eccentric or intense man is the indifferent, indecisive, and profane man. 

Sometimes women choose this sort of man to love regardless of his impotence. They do the whole thing. She chooses him, she deludes herself. For whatever reason, he has not chosen her, he does not delude himself. In this situation, she may make the mistake of making him her God instead of the love, the mutually agreed upon contract, the transcendent higher power. Instead of hating him– a product of the selfishness component– she hates love, she hates her love. She belittles it like he belittles it. She is ashamed of her wonderful belief in its suffocating omnipotence. And it hurts, to lose faith. When she speaks about loving him there are tears in her eyes, the creeping disbelief underlying the tone in her voice: “Why won’t he see his salvation in me?”

Ultimately, unrequited love is not devastating, or at least particularly devastating. For indeed, love is to be devastating at times, devastation is part of the package of love pursued reciprocally. The true mark of unrequited love is this sense of destabilization. Her faith is shaken. There’s something not right, not true, with her, or with him, or most malignant of all, with love itself.

In contrast, the mark of reciprocated love is stabilization. It is the steady rock in the middle of a merciless sea. It is not, perhaps contrary to popular belief, elation– but elation, like devastation, is certainly part of the package (and this is to say that elation can too be found in unrequited love)! Love is exciting, boring, rejuvenating, exhausting, fast, slow, hot and cold, it is every paradox inherent to humans, but its above-us quality lays in its stabilizing nature. We’ll get lost in the world, we’ll always suffer, we will again and again confuse ourselves, but for those of us so lucky, love always holds the door open for us out of the chaos into a room so lovely and warm.