Blog for 13/14th February… what’s love got to do with anything?

It’s St Valentine’s Day – well, maybe 20 minutes left of it… so what is it all about, er, love, actually…?

Human beings can’t live without love. I observe people with hypochondria, people with a range of similar attention seeking behaviours, and I think ‘if that person believed they were truly loved, they wouldn’t need to do this’.

So what is this ‘condition’ that we call love? How much of its alleged affective power is driven by desire? How much of this desire is driven by the will? How much is that glorious chilled feeling of being with someone who really seems to ‘see’ you, and in whose company you no longer need to try? And what does this not trying mean – that you can behave badly? That your faults will be overlooked? That you never have to say you’re sorry?

I think that particular line from Love Story is responsible for many disasters in relationships. This is because maturity must count for a lot in adult life… we need to take responsibility for our actions, fully aware that the other person is a living, breathing human just like us. If the other person is perceived as a parent or a reactionless passive teddy bear there lies the recipe for disaster. Maturity means being aware of normal healthy boundaries.

There is so much unreality around us. This messes up everything. Unrealistic expectations: the prince who tells Cinderella that he was made for charm, not sincerity. The belief that there is just one person for everyone. That ‘amor vincit omnia’. I hope that that at least is true for everything in creation – that love will conquer everything, but I think ‘conquer’ is the wrong word.

Definitions of love never appear without affect, it seems – and yet there’s a strong component of discipline in making and sticking to decisions about it in daily life. The Ancient Greeks divided it into types – erotic, brotherly, family, the spiritual and unselfish ‘agape’. I’m not sure they covered the deep, biochemical attraction that can lead to the lasting peace in the soul that says ‘it’s OK – you’re home now’. There are too many overlaps and grey areas in the bits in between their, dare I say, reductionist typologies.

Someone once wrote that animals – particularly dogs – exist to show us humans the meaning and outworking of unconditional love. For me, there’s nothing like the experience of the open hearted trust of a puppy falling asleep in my arms. I lost my little dog last February – he was the most tremendous character and I’ll always miss him. I also miss my friends who have died and whom I loved because they were great people. – they’ve never left me. We may never have said we loved each other – this could have been misconstrued, perhaps – but it was always there. I don’t think it’s possible not to love in friendships, actually.

So how does love relate to desire? I think it’s quite different. Desire is driven by ‘I want’. Love is driven by ‘I am’, ‘it is’. Is desire a driver, ultimately selfish? Is love the force that holds – a condition of existence that precedes desire, because desire must result from an analysis and assessment of what is in order to subjugate it? Love is a force and a state simultaneously that being open by nature invites us to enter it. Definitions of this are difficult, but I belief love is the primordial virtue. It’s a condition of existence, the twin tram track alongside forgiveness according to which life exists.

So If I ask that question – what has love got to do with anything? the answer must be everything and nothing. Love patiently waits for us to notice its presence, because it is always there. The waiting is not because of weakness. Love is the medium that enables existence – its presence is the elephant in the room, if an elephant that fills every inch of it. If we don’t engage with it it’s like holding your breath in order not to engage with oxygen. Eyes closed tightly we can roll around the world pretending a lack of sensory perception but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

I’m going back to Julian of Norwich with this – the first woman writer published in English. In one of her visions, she saw a hazelnut in the palm of a human like hand, – the nut represents everything that exists, and it exists because God loves it. Think of that – the gaze of God, not defined by human ideas of what this might be. The smile of God gazing with delight on creation. Holding, maintaining, and if you want it to be, empowering.

Happy Valentine’s Day!