How to Make Sense of Love
(or, How to Make Sense of Yourself, part II)
Disclaimer: What follows are my thoughts on love. I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I am just a person who likes to think seriously, analytically, about what is important to me. For me, serious thinking is a natural way to express what matters to me. Unfortunately, it is an inferior means to express love, though sometimes, it is all that is possible.
At the heart of all human behaviour is feeling: sensation and emotion. Our feelings are filtered through many layers of mental processes, like instinct, acculturation, and intellect. The mental realm of emotion is without language. Our linguistic minds can only capture vague impressions of the powers that dwell there.
The primary evidence of our emotions is in their effects on our thoughts and our sense of our desires, which are felt as urges to act. When we fulfill our urge to act, it manifests in behaviour. The behaviours we wish to enact and those we can enact are often not the same, however, because the world and our own minds constrain us. I believe that our thoughts and desires reveals the components of our natures, while the way we allow ourselves to act reveals their proportions. (The ways the world allows us to act is a completely different subject.)
Human beings experience countless emotions. Our thoughts are full of them. The complex ways in which we behave reveal them. Love is one of the most profound emotions, or so we take for granted. But what is love? Love may actually be the confluence of many different feelings, an amalgam of many different desires and impulses. But I won’t continue that line of inquiry to its end. I am not going to dissect love into fundamental drives resulting from the instinct for self-preservation. Although I accept that, from the point of view of scientific realism, that is a tenable objective understanding of love.
I am interested now in the subjective understanding of love.
It is through love’s manifestations that the focus of feelings of love recognizes love’s existence at all. Love felt by one person for another person most properly manifests itself as two major characters. There is an instinctive (or immature) character, and a thoughtful (or mature) character.
We can love both people and things (or ideas) in both immature and mature manners. Sometimes we love with varying proportions of mature and immature love. But in the end, it is mature love which is the most rewarding for all.
The first, or immature character of love, is the most self-actualizing from the point of view of the lover. It is the most self-serving. It involves the immediate desire to act overtly lovingly, usually with affection and intimacy. Intimacy can be emotional, intellectual, and physical. It is the immature character of love which we associate with being in love, but also in other forms as well. It feels wonderful, because we do not have to suppress our urges. We simply do what comes naturally, which is to seek closeness in order to increase our sense of security. Our sense of security in love is felt when our affections are accepted, and multiplied when those affections are returned in a manner which we find acceptable.
Objectively, I believe that most normal people (and this is culturally dependent) recognize and experience immature love through the same set of fundamental acts. However, each individual places emphases on certain expressions more than others. In addition, our experiences, particularly of emotional traumas, may drive our emphatic longings for particular expressions (shown or received) to a neurotic or even pathological level. Or we may feel a need for additional, uniquely personal demonstrations related to the experiences which formed our personalities.
Immature love is also that part of us which most demands to feel love in return. And neurotic love seems to affect our need to experience certain acts of love as much or more so than it affects our need to express them. Neuroses may also require us to inhibit what would otherwise be natural expressions. But I do not wish to dwell on neurotic love.
When two people are in love, there seems to generally come a time when there arises a perception of incompatibility between their mutual needs to show and experience expressions of love. The incompatibility can happen in one direction or both. Depending on the severity and the duration of the perceived incompatibility, this will be experienced as falling “out” of love. At that point, either mature love takes over, or the relationship must change dramatically, possibly coming to an end. The incompatibility of immature love feelings may be overcome by one or both lovers making a change in themselves, that is, by finding new ways to show and experience love through new expressions which are more compatible with their lover, but such a change requires a sufficient sense of mature love for the other. That ability to grow with someone is the key to a long-term relationship.
The mature character of love moves the focus away from the well-being of the lover—of the self of the one feeling love—towards the well-being of the loved, the other person. Mature love is the expression of love as it is understood to be of value to the object of love. More than that, it is the very act of learning to understand the one loved, in order to learn what he or she needs to not only feel but to actually be care for. Learning to care for another person is probably the most challenging, noble and rewarding experience which life can offer.
Mature love is the love which parents feel for their children. There is certainly an instinctive urge underlying mature love, but in human beings it also depends upon a cognitive change.
To feel mature love for something or someone, that other must be taken into the lover’s conception of themselves. In order for me to love you as you need to be loved successfully, I must feel that we are part of something larger than just my own individual self: my body and mind. I must enlarge my sense of self until it includes you. At that point, I can respond equally to your own sense of your needs as to my own sense of them.
In romantic love, which requires a level of equality (at least, at this time and place in history), both lovers must achieve a similar capacity for mature love before the immature aspect of love encounters its first serious incompatibility.
Equal capacity need not be arrived at simultaneously. However there is only one case where a relationship can survive when both lovers do not extend their senses of self at the same time. If only one lover achieves a state of mature love early, that is, if he is able to extend his sense of self before he experiences a crisis of immature incompatibility, he can survive the crisis. However, the other person still has to the follow the same pattern, or she will not be able to weather the crisis, and will likely terminate the relationship. The longer the delay between each person’s developing mature love, the less likely it is that the relationship can survive, at least as a committed, enduring love.
Mature love is not necessarily better than immature love, but if you believe that an enduring love is better than a brief, passionate love, you must be able to extend your sense of self to include your lover. To do this requires great emotional resources, and sufficient time and energy to spend on determining and fulfilling the needs of the one loved. Mature love is expensive.
What enables one to extend one’s sense of self to include another? Sympathy, primarily. We must be able to identify with another’s experiences, mostly through sympathy with their emotions in response to those experiences. All human beings have the same emotional range and depth, unless they are severely damaged. Thus, theoretically, we can all sympathize with one another’s emotions. However, understanding the relationships between another person’s life experiences and his or her emotional responses is very difficult. In addition to being able to accept that the connections are valid, we must be willing to learn all about how the other person understands the world. We must be able to bridge the gap of understanding.
Bridging the gap of understanding, to sympathize with another person, whether a lover or not, requires intimate knowledge of that person’s world. To know another person is to know their language, their culture, their relationships, their injuries. It is to know their manner of thinking. Such intimacy can occur through communication.
Another means to find understanding is to have shared experiences, especially emotional significant experiences. Shared experiences required shared time together. That’s fairly normal for most loving relationships, but not all, so communication must make up for the lack of shared experiences if possible.
The last means to understand someone is to achieve sympathy through empathy, or an intuitive understanding that happens without obvious means. This is probably the most difficult means, as it requires the empathetic person to usually have more experience than the other person.
Finally, one may also be able to achieve a mature love for another person by choice. That is, one may simply decide that another person deserves love because they need it, coupled with a belief that people should be cared for. To love someone without an instinctive or emotional understanding, however, is the most difficult challenge in life. It requires a deep emotional maturity, a fully developed value system containing a primary component of compassion, and the same emotional and material resources that any mature love requires. Few of us ever achieve that level of enlightenment.
For myself, such enlightenment is what I work towards, but my progress is admittedly slow. I write here as a part of my efforts to walk this path, and I give of myself to those I love as best I can, as well. Often, it seems that it is not enough. Learning to accept my own limitations in that way is all part of the process, however. I can only hope that it is working, and that it is recognized, for what is love that cannot be appreciated? Lonely and ineffectual, and impotent.