Perhaps the most intoxicating and complex mystery of human experience, love as a concept is one verdant with possible interpretation. In the arts and literature certainly no other emotion has been explored and examined with such forensic scrutiny or poetic beauty.
You might agree with the bleak assessment of Charles Bukowski that 'love is like a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality'; or with Noam Chomsky who once said that 'I don't know what love is, but life is empty without it'; or with Milan Kundera's interpretation of Plato that 'love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost'.
I have found myself wooed by the embrace of cynicism towards the concept of love in recent months. No matter love's conviction or perceived strength, the fact that it might buckle under circumstantial or superficial pressures is a reality that neither logic nor rationality can seem to explain away.
There is of course the political science 'horseshoe theory' that holds extremes to be closer connected than is commonly accepted.
I think this can be borrowed in application to the emotions of love and hate - almost within touching distance, the intensity of the emotions provoking easy oscillation between them. The interpreter of Freud might seek to rationalise this as being due to the paradoxical idea that we develop in childhood from the objects of our (at that time passive) love - parents - being figures we frequently hate or even feel afraid of.
It's equally easy to be cynical about love when surveying the technological landscape. The recent Vanity Fair article by Nancy Jo Sales 'Tinder and the dawn of the 'Dating Apocalypse'' depicts a deranging and decadent zeitgeist of frivolous sexual encounters and physical intimacy being reduced into the fast-food mentality of commoditisation and the satiation of endless greed. Not to mention the Ashley Madison data hacking which has lifted the stone of real-life relationships to reveal the digital insects of adulterous intent, insecurity and unhappiness lurking beneath.
Yet there have been convincing cases made that monogamy as a state of being is antithetical to our human nature, engineered over centuries as a moral virtue as a means of enshrining stability and loyalty within society, as evidence perhaps of our species gradually civilising itself.
Very recently though I have had something of a change of heart on the subject. It is my contention that in modern culture and society we fail to adequately celebrate real love. We celebrate and promote narcissistic vanities and shallow conceits to emotional potency, but not real love that exists and has existed between people regardless of whether or not it has since faded. Too often, animosity, bitterness and recrimination stain the portrait of prior contentment, leaving regrets stacked up like dirty dishes to drip dry over time.
Simply put, if it is possible to say from an experience of love - whether lasting one day or 10,000 days - that you have been enriched and vitalised on an imaginative, philosophical and human level, then it can only be something to be celebrated and not unduly mourned for being no more.
The continual layering and compaction of experience's sediment through which the self grows, that for me is love. In my case, this is manifest in countless things, from the trivial (a taste for sushi) to the revelatory (a new-found appreciation for the wonders of nature).
Two lines run in parallel for a while, held in delicate equilibrium by the strength of magnetic forces that often defy easy definition, and either they continue or divert away. But in either case, if the forces that bound them were strong enough they can equally be so once the direction of each becomes altered.
But enough of the theorising. The best definition of love I have come across is that provided by the genius of Woody Allen...
'To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.'
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