The essence of love

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Men speak conveniently of love, when it suits their purpose
The giving of love is an education in itself

- Eleanor Roosevelt

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Love: the word connotes different meanings to diverse personalities. From causing one to appreciate, delight in, and crave the presence or possession of another; and, to please or promote the welfare of the other; to sexual passion or the gratification of it; the word love can have a variety of related but distinct meanings in different contexts. Often, other languages use multiple words to express some of the different concepts that English relies mainly on “love” to encapsulate. In English, love refers to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from pleasure to interpersonal attraction. “Love” may refer specifically to the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love; to the sexual love of Eros; to the emotional closeness of familial love, or the platonic love that defines friendship; to the profound oneness or devotion of religious love. This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.

The nature or essence of love is a subject of frequent debate. When discussed in the abstract, love usually refers to interpersonal love, an experience felt by a person for another person. Love often involves caring for or identifying with a person or thing, including oneself. In addition to cross-cultural differences in understanding love, ideas about love have also changed greatly over time. Because of the complex and abstract nature of love, discourse on love is commonly reduced to a thought-terminating cliché, and there are a number of common proverbs regarding love, from Virgil’s “Love conquers all” to The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love”. Aristotle, defines love as “to will the good of another.” Bertrand Russell describes love as a condition of “absolute value,” as opposed to relative value. Philosopher Gottfried Leibniz said that love is: to be delighted by the happiness of another.

Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts. Love also is sometimes referred to as being the “international language”, overriding cultural and linguistic divisions. Whatever it may be, love seems to have three different components: intimacy, commitment, and passion. But there are those who say that love is all about attachment, caring, and intimacy. Whichever way one may interpret it, I find that many of the male members of the human species in Sri Lanka, and I would say especially the young, equate love with lust.

Lust is an emotional force that is directly associated with the thinking or fantasizing about one’s desire, usually in a sexual way.

The link between love and lust has always been a problematic question in philosophy. Schopenhauer notes the misery which results from sexual relationships. According to him, this directly explains the sentiments of shame and sadness which tend to follow the act of sexual intercourse. For, he states, the only power that reigns is the inextinguishable desire to face, at any price, the blind love present in human existence without any consideration of the outcome. He estimates that a genius of his species is an industrial being who wants only to produce, and wants only to think.

The theme of lust for Schopenhauer is thus to consider the horrors which will almost certainly follow the culmination of lust.

In many religious doctrines lust is loosely defined with the result that it is often equated and confused with the physical expression of love in the sexual act.

In fact, it is said that lusting is only the ‘thinking’ about sex, and this thinking about the natural sexual energy gives rise to a separate powerful emotional condition known as lust.

This emotional condition is the problem in love. There is a famous quote on the subject of celibacy (with regard to being free of sexual force) clarifying the definition of love: “You don’t need a celibate body, you need a celibate mind.”

A celibate mind is a mind free of lust.

The natural attraction between the sexes is pure and holy. The physical act of sex in the absence of wanting and trying, thinking and fantasizing (lust), results in the creation of a state of love in the bodies.

The error in love is to think about sex.

However, one should not confuse lust with lechery. Lust is an interior, psychological action. Lechery is behaviour, a physical manifestation or behavioural pattern of an interior condition (lust). Lust does not necessarily result in the action of lechery. The dictionary definition confirms that lechery is a behaviour: inordinate indulgence in sexual activity; unrestrained and promiscuous sexuality; immoderate indulgence of sexual desire; lewd and lustful behaviour.

If I have dwelt so much on love, lust and lechery; it is because not many amongst the young know the difference between these actions. Many tend to confuse one for the other, if one is to go by the behaviour exhibited.

I think it is mainly due to this bewilderment, when lust is mistaken to be love, and the error leads on to marriage, that many a newly wed finds marriage to be a disappointing proposition once the initial euphoria fades. Scientific research has established that lust rarely last more than a few weeks or months. Recent studies in neuroscience have indicated that as people fall in love, the brain consistently releases a certain set of chemicals, which act in a manner similar to amphetamines, stimulating the brain’s pleasure centre and leading to side effects such as increased heart rate, loss of appetite and sleep, and an intense feeling of excitement. Research has indicated that this stage generally lasts from one and a half to three years. Since the lust and attraction stages are both considered temporary, a third stage is needed to account for long-term relationships.

Attachment is the bonding that promotes relationships lasting for many years and even decades.

Attachment is generally based on commitments such as marriage and children, or on mutual friendship based on things like shared interests.Considering all the above aspects of love, I would say to the ladies: beware; men speak conveniently of love, when it suits their purpose. I am sure most ladies will know what that purpose is!

See you this day next week. Until then, keep thinking, keep laughing. Life is mostly about these two activities.

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