Reflection on Love

What exactly is love?

One of the great questions of all time: What is love? We have all experienced in one way or another, happier or more painful, what love is; but we are in trouble defining exactly what it is and how we distinguish it from other emotions and sensations in our inner world.

Evidence of how complicated it is to define love is what we find in the dictionary of the language when we go to the corresponding entry: “Intense feeling of the human being who, starting from his own insufficiency, needs and seeks the encounter and union with another being” or also: “Feeling towards another person who naturally attracts us and who, seeking reciprocity in the desire for union, completes us, makes us happy and gives us energy to live together, communicate and to create".

As can be seen, they are two particularly long definitions, for a dictionary, and full of debatable, debatable, sometimes ambiguous elements. We know, in any case, that love is a feeling: something that is felt, that is experienced internally.

We believe, then, that it is characteristic of human beings, since we do not know if they really animals they can feel it. And, from the rest, we know that it is a desire for union and attraction, that is, that one usually wants to be close to what he loves. So far there is little to object.

But the rest of the definition is difficult to accept without question: is union really what we achieve with those we love? Is the attraction they exert on us really “natural”? What if the love is not reciprocal? Does not exist? If love brings us joy, why is it sometimes so painful?

For a minimal love story

Love, we suppose, has always existed. We have found ancestral tombs with couples buried in the same place, or the remains of lovers surprised by the disaster and, faced with pain and death, chose simply to be together. We have read the ancient stories about the pain of rejected lovers, or the rage of the jealous, or the determination of those who want to avenge the murdered lover. We have always known that love is a possibility and that it is one of the great things in life.

However, we have not always thought of love in the same way. We have not always associated it with monogamous life and marriage, nor have we thought of it in the tragic and sweeping terms that Romanticism inherited. Love may be a reality, something emotional with clear roots in the corporeal, but it is also a concept that we learn in school, an ideal that is sold to us on television. That does not mean that it does not exist, that it is a hoax, but that we must distinguish between love and the way we are taught to think about love.

Tristan and Iseult, a legendary couple from medieval tales, are a knight and a noble lady who are madly in love with each other. She, however, is married to the king, the same king that Tristan serves, and therefore her love is impossible and unfeasible. And when destiny, cruel or generous, depending on how you see it, grants them a single night together, the selfless gentleman will interpose his sword between his body and that of his beloved, lest something happen between the two that does not it should.

How many of us today would make the same decision? How many, instead, prey to the rage of jealousy, like Shakespeare's Otello, do not murder their unfaithful partners every day? And how many young people, like Goethe's Werther, today prefer to take their own lives rather than live without the woman they are in love with?

These questions are difficult to answer, but they make it clear that the way we think—and we probably feel—love is not quite “natural” as one would suppose, but is pregnant with all our tradition and our culture. We have learned it without knowing very well how. Does that mean that love is, like honor was in 16th-century Spain, a cultural concept, one that we could one day get rid of?

Who knows. What is certain is that 12,000 years after our dominion over the planet began, we continue to feel love, although we do not know if it is exactly the same. Not even our most reliable contemporary instrument - the science— may give us some useful answers in that regard. What is the use of reducing love to a series of chemical reactions in the brain? To an evolutionary form of social behavior that guarantees the percentages pup survival?

They may be valid explanations, but they tell us nothing about the love we feel. Isn't it love what we feel for that friend who gets sick, and that leads us to take care of him without expecting anything in return? Isn't it love that sometimes leads us to give up the one we love so as not to harm him or ourselves?

How many loves are there?

Love, it seems, happens in many different ways. Buddhists distinguish, for example, a carnal, sexual, passionate love (kama), driven by selfishness and which constitutes an obstacle to enlightenment, benevolent and unconditional love (metta) that lacks selfish interests and is based on detachment and detachment. And like Hinduism, it always prefers the second to the first.

In contrast, more modern perspectives such as those of social psychology propose that we distinguish between various "amatory archetypes", that is, ways in which love is manifested: playful or sports love (ludus), who avoids commitment and entertains himself in conquest; the love of the friendship and fellowship (store), who share the tastes and a certain level of commitment; and erotic love (Eros) in which the body, physical and emotional passion predominate, based on aesthetic and romantic enjoyment.

These and other forms and classifications of love may be useful, perhaps, to understand and live what love gives us. makes you experiment, to give it a name and to know what things to expect from it and perhaps how it is convenient to suffer it to the extent fair. But it does not tell us what love is, where it comes from and why we experience it.

So perhaps poets are the right ones for that task, since their verses they give a name to what does not have one, they say the ineffable, they make exist what does not exist. Perhaps it is the enigma of the poetry the true language of love: not so much because it is a beautiful, romantic and elevated language, or not only because of that, but because "love" is a mysterious word, basically untranslatable into words.

“Love” is the name we give to different experiences, it is clear. And perhaps that is why it is a name that says more about who we are, about our subjective history and our historical moment, than it really says about what love really is. Perhaps it is a wild-card word that we use for lack of another true one, a sound in which we take refuge when the world seems much bigger than we ourselves are.

References:

• "Love in Wikipedia.
• "love" in the Language Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy.
• "What is love? This is what science tells us The country (Spain).
• "Love in ABC Wellness (Spain).

What is a reflection?

A reflection or dissertation is a text in which the author thinks freely about a topic. In this type of text the author shares his thoughts with the reader, and invites him to assume a point of view or evaluate different arguments, without there necessarily being an objective for reflection other than the mere pleasure of thinking about the subject. The reflections can deal with any topic and be more or less formal, and can be part of speeches, books, etc.

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