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What's Love Got to Do With It?
By Robert Delamar
"What's love got to do with it (got to do with it)? What's love but a second hand emotion?"
--Tina Turner
I'm madly in love. It's not a sickness as the preceding sentence seems to suggest, but sometimes I wonder if it says a lot more than would seem at first instance.
I was married in the summer of 1997, at the age of 21. Much too young if I consider it. It makes sense to me in the end, however, in the round about way these things do, in that when you think you love someone enough to marry them at 21 you aren't really thinking at all.
No, I'm not crazy, but madness comes close. I prefer to think of love as electric. But I'll come back to that.
Love, in all of its myriad and manifest forms, is a topic that could exhaust even the heartiest mind. I'm even tired getting psyched to think about it. One can approach it in innumerable ways. Theologically: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Philosophically: “What exactly is love? Psychoanalytically: “Mama!” But I prefer to approach the way that Tina does: Honestly.
Love is one of the by-products of the most powerful form of energy on the planet: Human Relationship. And like other forms of human energy, such as electricity, too much of it can be fatal. Let me explain.
I grew up in a town that had more dairy cows than people. Next to the schoolyard there was a farm, and the farm fence was electrified. This produced the result that our schoolyard fence, from time to time, was electrified too (I'm not going to comment on my childhood educational experience, this isn't the appropriate forum, still it is somehow an apt metaphor). As kids, you don't know any better, when one of your friends says: “Dare you to touch the fence.” You touch the fence. What's really perverse about human nature, is the next step. “I bet you can't do it longer than me.” Too many times touching the fence left me a little wiser. The moral I took from this most vital of childhood lessons? The amount of electricity needed to keep a dairy cow in a farmyard, is sufficient to keep a school kid in the playground.
Love is like the electric fence that surrounded my elementary school. Half-dare. Half-I think-I-can-do-it. Half-we'll- see-what-happens. Half-it'll-be-different-next-time. And of course the inevitable tears when the same thing happens again. Love, like electricity, is a valuable source of wisdom. It taught me that whatever you think you know, you really don't. Until you think you know it once you've done the same thing again. In short, love is didactic. Didactic and conservative.
Love in the 21st century, looks similar to love in the past. Only the setting has changed. The 19th century “mail-order” bride has become the 21st century “Internet romance.” Though the environment may change, love remains steadfast. It will remain so into the foreseeable future. That's because love, like electricity, is something we need to survive yet we take for granted most of the time. When the power goes out, whether it be in love or when you're typing that last page of a philosophy paper, you notice that it's gone. It's inconvenient, it leaves you frustrated, even angry. That' s because it's usually beyond our power. It's a vis major, an act of God. And that's the fallacy of the whole experience. Love isn't something you can control. Like kids in schoolyards, and cows in farmyards, to use love as an excuse to mask deeper fears (“My kid playing in the shit in the field next to the school?” “Never!”) is to rob it of its purpose.
Studies have shown (which means this is an apocryphal story--but I swear I read it somewhere) that when a person is in love, they think of themselves as being more attractive, more intelligent, and more interesting, than they do during “normal” times. The resulting effect is a willingness to risk, to dare to make an arse of self, in order to gain the object of desire. The person that is loved. Yet, this effect quickly fades. Reality strikes. The loved one, becomes real, and the inevitable apathy ensues, the nagging questions begin: “What was I thinking?”
And that is, after all my point. I'm glad I wasn't thinking “do I really love her” when I got married, because to have thought about “why” I loved my wife, would be to defeat the purpose of our love. Our love is a wonderful thing because it's mysterious. Because the motivation is complex, and just like grabbing the elementary school fence, because we were curious. Curious about selves, and the other. Curious about what it is to be so incredibly close, so intimate, and yet to experience such crushing feelings of loss and loneliness. Curious to understand what it is in ourselves that motivates us selfishly, to give up self in order to know another.
I don't know why I grabbed the elementary school fence when I was a kid, but I know why I don't make a habit of it now. It hurts when you do, and the memory of the hurt eventually sinks in, leaving us afraid and unwilling to try again. But love, like electricity, is a fire. When you're burning up, you're not worried about the heat. It's only when it stops that you feel the pain. If I had kept holding on, instead of letting go, besides being brain-damaged, I may have learned a little bit more about myself.
In order to have had the courage to risk saying to a person: “I'd like to spend the rest of my life with you” in my youth, something crazy had to be going on. Something electric. I'd never have learned to leave the fence alone, if I hadn't touched it first. And I'd never have gotten married if I hadn't been in love. To control, is not to love. To be out of control is to get close.
Throughout human history people have tried and failed to understand this subject, a topic as complex as each individual who has attempted it. In this sense, love is a universal failure of understanding. Lunacy in other words. And that's why I'm happy with my own experience of it. As imperfect as is my understanding, is the beauty of my daily attempt to understand. To awake in the morning and to see my beloved beside me. To start each day afresh with her.