I was asked to answer the following questions on love because, supposedly, I’m a thinker. Here are the questions and my responses.
1. What is love (to you)?
Love is a feeling, an emotion, a state of being where you care for someone else’s well-being, you care about their feelings, you want to make them happy, see them happy, you don’t mind sacrificing for them.
2. What is IN love (to you)? I don’t differentiate the terms love and in love simply because I don’t think there’s any quantifiable way to define how much one loves another person. We use the words love for family and friends and people we don’t want to have sex with and we use the words in love for someone to whom we are romantically attracted. I don’t love the little boy I baby-sit for any more or less than I once loved his father. Most people would get upset if I were to say that I was in love with a child but my level of emotion, concern, and the depth of my feelings is on par with the love I’ve felt for grown men. I want to see him smile, I look forward to seeing him, I miss him when he’s not here, I think of things to do for him that will make him happy. Those are the exact same things I once felt for his father. Because I have no sexual feelings for him, society says I’m not “in love” with him. I say society needs to separate romantic love from “other” love because we are so sexually repressed, because we don’t teach people how to love, only what it is to be loved. I LOVE my sister and I don’t think I’ve seen her more than a half a dozen times in my life. I still remember the first time I laid eyes on her, she was a grown woman . The feeling of wanting her to be happy and healthy, of wanting to protect her . . . it still brings tears to my eyes. I’m in love with her. My love for her is active and growing and alive.
3. Have you or anyone you know, mistaken LOVE for IN LOVE? If the assumption is that being “in love” is somehow real and true and that to only “love” someone means that the love is superficial or doesn’t have as much substance or validity as being “in love” then I reject the terms. I have fallen in love with men who I’ve later been repulsed by. I’ve loved men who have not deserved my love. I’ve loved men who have fooled me into thinking they were someone that they were not. I love men whom I once cared for deeply but have no romantic feelings for currently. Love can grow and evolve, the depth of one’s feelings can change and transform. Love is real. The baggage we apply to it is what makes it appear false.
4. Is conditional love natural or can it be inherited? I think conditional love is a manifestation of selfishness. Conditional love is only loving someone if they love you a certain way, if they only fulfill your needs in a way that is pleasing to you. That is a creation of a society that teaches people to love themselves, to only look out for number one. I think we teach our children conditional love by beating them, by withholding love from them when they misbehave, by not showing them healthy examples of love. I think conditional love is a sickness we’ve inherited from a society that is spiritually bereft.
5. Why is love so complicated when it suppose to be the most simplest of all acts and feelings? We live in a society of fear. We fear that if we love someone and we don’t get that love returned, that we have to hurt them back. We live in a society that teaches us how to be loved, to enjoy the feelings of someone treating us special but we don’t learn how to make someone else feel special. Love is complicated because we are taught models of love from our mothers and fathers, who most often were not together, who fought, who didn’t love each other, and who brought a whole host of other emotional issues to the table when they did. Love is difficult because it leaves us vulnerable and that is scary. Love is difficult because it takes work. Love is difficult because we fall in love with money and looks and superficial things that have nothing to do with true emotion and feeling. It’s hard to find love because first we need to love ourselves, and to do that, we have to take the bandage off our emotional wounds and really heal them and that hurts.
6. Is 'material' love a bad thing? If yes, then how can we 'de-love' it? If by material love, you mean love of things, I think that is purely a manifestation of Eurocentrism. Almost all indigenous, brown people loved the land, they loved their people, and they loved the Creator more than they loved things before the influence of Europeans. The importance of things, outside trinkets, stuff, money, belongings that give people a false sense of worth seems to stem from the people who think that they can take land, kidnap and kill people, steal possessions as their god-given right. The only way I can imagine to de-love material things is to see ourselves as truly spiritual beings, the way God intended us to be. If God is love, then all we are is love. If love is truth, then material things are the lie.
7. Is there really such a thing as self-love? (take your time on this one) I have to wonder why this question was posed as such. It seems to indicate that self-love is perhaps fictional or delusional. Self-love is not needing validation from someone or something else, it is holding yourself to a higher standard than others around you would. Self-love is making sure you don’t put yourself in harmful, dysfunctional situations. Self-love is very real. It is knowing yourself, your triggers, your weaknesses, it’s knowing everything about yourself, the good and the bad, and being comfortable in your own skin.
