I’m on a kick, I can’t seem to help it. I have this new obsession with understanding love more, or better, or perhaps offensively, more better. That’s half the problem, and I know it. You can’t understand something that is feeling. You can approximate it, or represent it with word pictures. But you can’t really ever understand it, I suppose. There’s a couple things that have me hung up right now, and they are the words we use for people that we love.
So I have family, and I’m allowed to love them. In fact, I’m expected to love them. Then I have friends, and I love them, but in this kind of amorphous way that if you say it wrong, or to the wrong person then you’re weird and psycho. Chemistry is a word I’ve been using lately because it seems half way between love: I want to jump your bones, and love: Yeah, I’d bail you out of jail. But there’s the catch isn’t it. We can’t love without being in love, but then again we can.
I always think back to the Greek when english gets hairy. (I’m pretty sure that’s the wrong spelling, but I like the word anyway, it makes me think of gorillas picking fleas out of each other’s fur and eating them.) In Greek there were three words for Love. And it’s a preachers favorite thing to take them and make them this all powerful triad of meaning. But still, it is kind of nice having more options. Philos, as in love of knowledge, but also gives its root the english friend. Except it could also mean lover. And the Greeks had their share of friends with benefits. There was Eros of course, the dirty book isle. And the beloved Agape of christians. So their meanings were far more gray than preachers would like, but still three different options would be cool.
The reason I’m on the meaning kick in the first place is due to this great article in a book I’m too lazy to get down right now. It’s about language and narrative in cognitive science. One of the authors, Allen I hope, talks about how things like evolution can never be understood, because they can’t be narrated. First of all, that’s huge to me; it makes my belief in the power of metaphors take root. Then it’s kind of scary too. Especially since the one consensus I get is that you can’t describe love. Anything that I can’t understand scares the shit out of me. So I begin this wandering wonder, hoping that somewhere a grasp will appear.
Now I move over to Zen, (yes it pops up everywhere I am,) which talks about universal human compasion, which is I’m pretty sure a very english translation of love. Love of everyone, unrestricted, just because they are. We are okay with this in general though, usually. I love humanity, I love my friends. I love this friend in particular, ah there’s the rub. Every time I hear friends with benefits, I get this internal giggle. We have no way to describe people that don’t fit into the dichotomous categories of our language. I wonder if the church is responsible for that development in western language? It does seem like a church thing, you’re either married or celebate. So it’s okay to love everyone in a particular category, (’The Gays’ as my friend Wendy, and Kathy Griffin would say,) but loving one person in that group causes such a confusion.
So, being the wonderful linguists that we are, we came up with ‘in love’ to describe that change of state from the one thing we can’t explain to the other thing that we can’t explain, all so that we don’t get freaked out every time someone says ‘I love you.’ Where’s the line? Not there in most cases, hence friends with benefits. Too little attachement to be in love, but too much to be ‘just friends.’ But, you say, what about the white elephant, sex?
You could turn everything around and look at it as dealing and refering to sex. Friends niether have sex, nor want to have sex with each other. (Fantasizing about it is on a case by case basis.) Friends with benefits have sex, but aren’t magically in love with each other. Or more acurately accept that it’s nice when you can get it, but you’re not fussed about being the only one. Then you have the ‘couple’ or ‘partners’ that are in love. Meaning they have sex, exclusively (for the most part), and are totally jazzed about that. I have to ask then, what about our new division between having sex, and making love?
Yes, we talk about seperating love and sex. So we can hookup without any emotional attachment what so ever, and that’s slightly different than friends with benefits because at least they care about each other to a degree, and are willing to talk to each other with the lights on, and use more words than ‘oh’ and ‘god.’ So now we have ‘in love’, and we have ‘making love.’ I suppose it would be people in love make love. But it’s pretty arogant to say that you can make something you don’t understand and can’t explain. Maybe it’s a nice way of saying banging my wife, or maybe it’s really a seperate meaning. I’ll have to refer this matter to couples who are ‘in love’ and ‘make love’ to try and sort out.
It seems a conclusion ought to be coming soon, I apologize for the pun, but I can’t help myself. What I know is that I love a few people, and that love is strong and grows quickly. If I had to define love it would be: I will do anything you need at three o’clock in the morning, no questions asked. I see this as covering a lot of things, from my dog just died I need a hug, to my dog just died and for some reason it made me horny. The problem is that I don’t know what ‘in love’ is in that context, and it seems to get me into trouble. I hate the ‘I like you’ precursor to will you go out/hookup/date me question. We could be honest and say, ‘I think I could love you forever in a romantic physical way, want to hang out and see?’ Wouldn’t that be easier than wondering around linguistic wastelands trying to decypher a text message that turned out to be a typo. ‘I like you, as a friend,’ ‘I like that shirt on you,’ ‘I like that shirt off of you.’ But it’s not so, we just can’t stand that word, love.
I’ve never seen any word cause more stir than love. I think I could drop the word ‘cunt’ around a group of women and recieve less suprise and shock than spring the word love on one of them unexpectedly. (I hate the word ‘cunt’ with a passion, in case you needed to know.) That sad look in their eyes, the oh, poor boy, you are deluded but I don’t want to say it that way. The ‘L’ word seems to divide us so quickly, even though we’re okay with it in other circumstances. I could ramble and rant for much longer, but I’ll wrap up instead. We are afraid of love, and we are afraid of what it means to love. We’ve lost our way. When there are thousands of ways to qualify what I mean when I say love, there’s something wrong with our understanding of it. It seems to me that if you can’t define love, you don’t get to decide when it’s used improprerly. What if we all just talked openly about it instead of hiding behind different phrases designed to cloud the message?
You can see why I’ll most likely grow old with cats, but maybe I’ll feel okay about that once erectile dysfunction settles in.