June 27, 2008
Love
Tonight, up too late and feeling strange, I had devoured all of the articles in my Google Reader feeds and most of my Chicken in a Biskit crackers and found myself casting about for something to read in cyberspace. On a whim, I googled the word “love”.
Happily, the results that were returned were not all about online dating services. One was a link to a website called wikiHow, a repository of advice on how to do things. The article was entitled “How To Love“. I read it with interest and was arrested by the following sentence:
Love is the continual act of unconditionally putting the needs of others before your own.
This is likely the best definition of the word I have ever seen. I’m tempted to go on a rant about how, by this definition, nobody in the family I was raised in loves me. Not my mother or father or brother or sister. But, that’s not the direction I want to focus my thoughts in, true though it sadly is.
No, the thing that moved me to tears earlier tonight (and yes, I’m a little emotional tonight, I admit that) was the “I Love the Whole World” video that was, of all things, a commercial for Discovery Channel. I had read the latest XKCD comic and it moved me to watch and re-watch the little video and the next thing I knew, I had tears streaming down my face as I felt this amazing love for life, the universe and everything, all of you out there in cyberspace, and I just had to write something about it.
If I couldn’t love, I couldn’t live. It’s gotten me through the end of my life and the end of my brother’s life. Love is beyond powerful, it’s staggering. It’s all I can feel right now. It’s all I want to feel.
I think that definition is wrong. It’s a tidy codification, but wrong.
The wikiHow article insists that anything less than unconditional love isn’t love at all but “deep-seated opportunism”. Unless its author has a new definition of the word “unconditional”, that’s a false dichotomy, it’s prescriptive, it’s overly-idealistic, it denies the complexity of human psychology, and it contradicts the article’s later admission that love “can be lost”. Losing love means precisely that it was conditional, and that one of those conditions wasn’t met. That we aren’t consciously aware of a condition when we start loving someone doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
We attach the label “love” to a diverse mess of complex behaviors. In describing personal relationships, I’ll happily refer to OED’s definition: “an intense feeling of deep affection”. Our practical treatment of others may coincide or contradict that feeling, depending on cultural indoctrination, personal experience, emotional stability, etc., etc., but a practical display of altruism such as consistently “putting the needs of others before your own” is not the whole sum of love.
Comment by falterer — June 28, 2008 @ 7:28 pm