It's time to talk about a taboo topic: LOVE.
From Hollywood movies to love stories to pop music to the media, almost all cultural manifestations in the West are based on some idea of romantic love. According to the narrative, love is -perhaps- the only means- to happiness. Yet, as our recent financial melt-down seems to show, we don't act like a happy society.
Most people seem indifferent with the fact that our culture uses "love" as a placebo to attract our attention to anything, whether material (such as money) or more intangible goods (such as fame).
No wonder love leads to manipulation, hatred, abuse, and even makes us kill.
How about asking the difficult questions?
Is love a kind of disease or an affectional bond based on the universal tendency for humans to seek closeness in order to experience security? Is it about limbic resonnance? Is it some kind of propinquity?
Is love a glorified form of serotonin rush inducing a pink-colored version of the world? (by the way, check this conference by Peter Salovey, professor at Yale College on Love, evolution & emotion).
I'll walk you through some hypothesis from Psychology, while contending some of these views:
In the 1970's Zick Rubin from Harvard proposed that romantic love is made up of three elements: attachment, caring, and intimacy. Attachment is the need to receive care, approval, and physical contact with the other person. Caring involves valuing the other persons needs and happiness as much as your own. Intimacy refers to the sharing of thoughts, desires, and feelings with the other person.1
In the end Rubin's hypothesis remain merely descriptive. Suppose that's what we do, but why? Can my need of attachment be also based on selfish manipulation? Is love not more than mere need? Can it be a form of excess?
According to psychologist Elaine Hatfield and her colleagues, there are two basic types of love: compassionate love and passionate love. Compassionate love is characterized by mutual respect, attachment, affection, and trust. Compassionate love usually develops out of feelings of mutual understanding and shared respect for each other. Passionate love is characterized by intense emotions, sexual attraction, anxiety, and affection. When these intense emotions are reciprocated, people feel elated and fulfilled. Unreciprocated love leads to feelings of despondence and despair. Hatfield suggests that passionate love is transitory, usually lasting between 6 and 30 months.
According to Hatfield, passionate love arises when cultural expectations encourage falling in love, when the person meets your preconceived ideas of an ideal lover, and when you experience heightened physiological arousal in the presence of the other person. Hatfield explores the possibility that "falling in love" could be a form of social brain washing. The idea is that passionate love ----> compassionate love, which is far more enduring. But does it? Is what they sell as "compassionate love" not a form of social domestication?
While most people desire relationships that combine the security and stability of compassionate with the intensity of passionate love, Hatfield suggests that this is rare.
So far compassionate love wins, passionate love looses. Isn't Hatfield Christianizing the idea of love, that is to say, infecting it too much with St. Paul's well known idea of agape? On the other hand, Hatfield makes an interesting point about cultural expectations. Why? Because Western "love" is sold as a cultural habit. As long as we're bombarded with "love," we'll go on spending money on wedding plans, expensive houses, baby's clothes, cars, and whatnot.
In his 1973 book The Colors of Love, John Lee compared styles of love to the color wheel. Just as there are three primary colors, Lee suggested that there are three primary styles of love. These three styles of love are: (1) eros, (2) ludos, and (3) storge. Continuing the color wheel analogy, Lee proposed that just as the primary colors can be combined to create complementary colors, these three primary styles of love could be combined to create different secondary love styles. For example, a combination of eros and ludos results in mania, or obsessive love.
Lee's three primary styles:
eros: loving an ideal person.
ludos: love as a form of conquest.
storge: love as friendship.
which bring about three secondary styles:
mania (eros + ludos): obsessive love.
pragma (ludos + storge): realistic and practical love.
agape (eros +storge): selfless love.
Another way to look at it is to admit that it's quite difficult to separate ourselves from the "desire" factor, that is, feeling attracted to people sexually. And that need -as many psychologists have hinted- is simply biological. Libido is a pull from the species to produce more offspring. And we mask this pull with all sort of sweet and nice words. In view of the sentimental and moral problems that our propensities entail, it is worth pondering the price we pay for our desires. But as Hume and Rousseau rightly assumed, our lives seem to be ruled by our desires.
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze did not see desire as a lack (as is commonly defined in psychology), but instead as a human form of production, with a positive side. He writes:
There is no such thing as the social production of reality on the one hand, and a desiring-production that is mere fantasy on the other…We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of production. There is only desire and the social, and nothing else. 2We need to explore further this link between our prevalent culture of love (that I referred to above) and the constant production of desires by the machinery of Capitalism. That is to say, the link between the economic and the sentimental side.
Do we love the way we want because we want, or is this form a prepackaged form of manipulation of the system? No wonder our idea of love cannot exist without the market that supports it.
Lastly, how to negotiate desire with respect? It's crucial to address how little we respect one another. How much we think love as a form of ownership (since so much inve$tment is usually required). Is it possible to love and respect one another. How?
(I'll close this post next Tuesday, March 29, at 11pm)
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1In 1958, British developmental psychologist John Bowlby published the ground-breaking paper "the Nature of the Child's Tie to his Mother", in which the precursory concepts of "attachment theory" were developed. 2Deleuze & Guatari, Anti Oedipus, p. 28, 29.
