Love (In the Spirit of Valentine's Day)

The above diagram illustrates something I've come to realize about the nature of love. When we say "love" we often use it in various contexts in which it can't possibly mean exactly the same thing. I love my wife, my mother, my poodle, my country, my breakfast sandwich, winter, summer, sex, knitting, hunting, animals, etc etc, fill in the blank. We have one word to describe a whole complex of relationships. Now what about the relationship between two people who "love" one another, an intimate couple? Surely here we have some universal sense of the word that can be applied to each one of these relationships. Yes and no. I think here humans are capable of great self-deception and even profound self-inflicted damage. Think of the husband who recently lost his wife to cancer, who a few years later meets another woman and has a difficult time telling her he loves her even though he most certainly does, yet avoids it out of feelings of guilt, as if he would be betraying his deceased partner. Think here of the woman who recently broke up with her boyfriend of many years, who hesitates to tell someone new that she loves him/her because she "thought" she was in love with the previous boyfriend but now tells herself she can't possibly know what that means anymore, etc. I think here the primary difficulty is thinking that love has a nature, or some fundamental substance/being separate from the people involved. It's something that we "fall into" or are "in", as if it was an object outside of oneself. It's something we can "give" to others, again as if it was an object or a gift. No, here I couldn't disagree more.

The diagram illustrates my thinking about this. We will say "love" is that bracketed <> part of the relational formula. Quite simply, love is a relation which cannot be reduced to a subject singularity (even if we speak of loving oneself: the moment we do this we have already made a distinction). This is exactly what these other formulations try to do. The love between subject A and 1 is formulated based on their specific relationship. It is impossible that what is shared between subject A and 1 is the same as that between A and 2, by very virtue of the fact that we are dealing here with (at least one) separate entities. The love shared between A and 1 (where R is relation) will only ever be AR1, and can never be understood in terms of AR2 or AR3. It is for this reason that an individual really can "love" more than one person concurrently.

In this vein, people who say "I will never love again!" are both within their right to say so, and also gravely mistaken. 1) They are within their right: The specific formulation will never be duplicated. So for example, the man who lost his wife to cancer will never repeat the specific love formula AR1 where he is A and his wife was 1. 2) They are gravely mistaken. A new formulation is always a possibility. Using the same example, he may indeed love his new partner, AR2. If our formula depended only on the man, he may well say this, but of course it is impossible to make such statements as a subject singularity. Love always refers, always relates, within a multiplicity. He should not fear that telling his partner somehow compromises the way he felt/feels for his deceased wife. In fact, he may continue to say he loves his deceased wife without somehow betraying his new love. Of course, it almost goes without saying that both parties need to share this understanding of "love" to avoid those feelings of guilt/pain associated with the older erroneous understanding.