A new look at love

by R.S. Karunaratne

Going through some of my old magazines I came across a catchy advertisement: "A revealing report on the most elusive of all emotions". I read on.

"Love. We've all yearned for it, suffered from it, delighted in it, and lost it. But how much do we know about it?"

"A new look at love" by Elaine Walster and William Walster was advertised in "Psychology today" in its June issue published in 1978. I never had the chance of reading this book. But it triggered my curiosity to investigate.

As I see it love is nothing but sex attraction. We want to love somebody and be loved. Sometimes young people want to know whether they are loved by the other party.

When in love, the boy asks the girl, "Do you love me?" In the west pat comes the answer: "Of course I do!." In the East, girls are not so outspoken, they show love but do not express it. I think this is a beautiful way of expressing your implicit love.

Then the girl asks: "Do you think I am beautiful?"

The boy says, "You bet!" without batting an eyelid.

"Are my eyes the loveliest you have gazed into?"

"Yes, of course!"

"Do I have a divine figure?"

"There's no question about it"

The girl eggs him to say more of such beautiful things in praise of her body: hair, lips, legs, bosom, eyes, nose, cheeks and what not!

So we call it love. A retired medical man quite familiar with human anatomy might call this "love" a "sheer nonsense." But he fails to understand the real magic of love which is innocent, beautiful and silly.

When you are in love with another person, you cannot say why you love him or her. This is because when once you fall in love, you do not look at a normal human being. You see a person crystallized! We do not see any defects in such a person. Similarly you cannot give any reason for your love towards another human being.

Love has never been rational. First we fall in love and then try to find a reason for that. We cannot say before hand: "I am going to love Mary" or "I wish to fall in love with Robin." That is why sometimes opposites get attracted to each other. Shakespeare fell in love with a woman who was elder to him. Monarchs fall in love with women who are their inferiors.

In the West love is a serious subject. There are many authorities who have written treatises on it. Out of them Stendhal stands out with his analysis of love. In fact "Love" was Stendhal's favourite subject. He wrote his masterpiece "Love" at a critical time in his life when his own love had been rejected. Critics say that the book is a thinly disguised pictures of the author's inner feelings.

In this highly readable book, Stendhal treats a wide variety of topics from courtly love to the emancipation of women. However, the central theme of the book is Stendhal's account of amour-passion an intense, romantic and generally unrequited love and his analysis of the power of the imagination to transfigure the image of the loved one.

Stendhal in his brilliant book sees four different kinds of love: Passionate love, mannered love, physical love and vanity-love. According to him, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.

What is more love too has a life of its own. After its birth, it lives for some time and dies. Like Shakespeare or George Bernard Shaw, sometimes love too attains immortality.

He explains the process of love somewhat in the following manner. First you admire somebody. Then you observe her perfection. Mind you, at this you do not see any defects. Then love is born. The first crystallization begins. You think your girlfriend has just fallen from heaven! You want to look at her all the time. However, after some time, you get tired of the whole affair.

The next step is that you subject your loved one to a critical examination. Again crystallization may spawn new charms. But you begin to ask: "Does she love me?" If the love object stays firm, you begin to think that you are the happiest man on earth.

When a man loves a woman, she feels it immediately because she has a special sense - organ for this. Unfortunately, men take a long time to realise whether a woman loves him or not. Some women do not love men.

They love cats and dogs. Stendhal says: "When heaven has endowed you with a soul made for love, not to love is to deprive yourself and others of great happiness. It is as if an orange tree dared not flower for fear of committing a sin." Similarly, there are men who have never fallen in love. Such men and women have missed a great miracle in life, ie, LOVE.

When it comes to the subject of love, Ovid comes second to Stendhal. In his brilliant book entitled "The Art of Love," originally written in Latin, he tells us that love is a subject which can never lose its fascination. What Ovid said 2,000 years ago are valid even today.

One advice given by Ovid is that you should not try to rush things. "Gradually make yourself indispensable to her; and when you are sure that she will long for you, leave her alone for a bit, so that your absence may give her some anxiety. But don't stay away too long. Out of sight may eventually be out of mind."

If you wish to read a modern author on love, the best book is Dr. Eustace Chesser's "Love without fear." He gives "Love's ten commandments." Here are few of them in his own words:

* Bring to the altar of love a healthy body and a knowledge of its powers and their employment.

* Never hurt the self-esteem of the one you love.

From whatever angle you look at it, love is the most elusive of all emotions because it is many splendoured.