What I Monologue About When I Monologue About Love

—Love...

—Love??? I don't like that word. I mean, I love it, I think about it a lot, but. It's easier for me to talk about love in terms of desire. Sternberg describes love as “commitment, intimacy, and passion.” That's good, he does a good job, it almost seems like he's speaking authoritatively about a real thing, but, basically, I can't account for all the ways people use the L-word,

—The L word.

—That's what I call it, I mean, it's an important word. I don't use it lightly. That word has serious consequences, maybe as much as the N-word and definitely more than the other L-word. I mean, I'm twenty-five. At this point, relationships start to get serious, come on, I start throwing the L-word around and people are going to get hurt, not to mention adding to the general confusion, this is serious business, people's hearts, for lack of a better word, and you've got to be really careful. I've done what I can to avoid the stupid misuses but, there's no way you can avoid all the ways "love" and the way people think about what love...all these ideas are actually guiding people's real decisions, fucking people up, I can't account for it. Is the love an old man has for his wife the same as the love he felt when he first met her? What's the difference? To me, there's an important difference there. We're talking about human life, not fantasies, or images. You should know what's going on, be aware, track the developments in your emotional states, you know? Christians talk about storge: familial love, eros: romantic love, and agape, which they think of as spiritual love but which I see as general human love, or even a kind of general political love, but which isn't really love as much as it is concern, at least in me, maybe I don't have as much love as I should have. Maybe there's one brand of love I'm forgetting. And the whole love-as-neurochemical-reaction thing is obviously uninteresting, simply because though we're scientifically aware of the presence of certain chemicals in the brain when someone provokes in us a strong desire, we still know nothing of causation and nothing of maintenance, not to mention all the first-person cognitive manifestations of those chemicals. Iris Murdoch said perhaps love should simply be defined as when you're always down to spend time with someone else. And, in a different book, she says that love may follow from a deep, unaccountable mystery. All that's interesting to me. People always talk about the difference between love and in-love, and that's a huge, devastating difference they're describing there and of course we all understand what it means when they say that, they mean, 'I don't really care anymore.' The first is general appreciation and concern—the second specifically includes desire, it's personal, in that way. That's close to where I'm at, at this point: I can't say anything about love, the word is overburdened, bogged down with centuries of bullshit, idealized nonsense. When I'm talking about love, I'm talking about sustained desire, desire at the highest level. Of course, when you're in it, it seems to have legs. But later you realize that it didn't. So then you go back and you change the words you use to describe that experience. I haven't really worked the eventual fading of desire into my thoughts, because, I can't imagine wanting to be with someone without simultaneously having a serious, ongoing desire for them. But I haven't been married for ten years, either. So there's that to think about. Basically, when I talk about love, I'm always talking about the romantic love. I say I love you to Mom when we get off the phone, and it's true, I love my mother, in a way, in a way, but, I say it just because it makes her happy for me to say it, and I want to make her happy, and not bog her down with a bunch of philosophical bullshit. It's easier to talk about familial love, anyways, it's not as complicated, and everyone knows what's going on when you say I love you in a familial context. When I was younger, I used to say it was love when someone was unreplacable to someone else for a certain period of time. And in a way, that still works for me, though there's nothing about desire in that definition, and a good definition of love by definition includes a discussion of desire. From a purely philosophical perspective, it is clear that love, like everything, is inextricably and necessarily one-sided, a feature of your individual experience—if I feel love, my partner don't have anything to do with it, that's my love. Solipsism, maybe. And of course, when we talk about love, we have to ignore solipsism. But maybe not, maybe it's random instances of one-sided love everywhere. And you can see that I can't quite integrate the whole self-sacrifice aspect of love as the word is commonly used. Maybe at this point we should think about love in terms of desire and knowing. You know someone, and you desire someone. Obviously, the desire for them means you want to know them, that seems important to me that it happens like that. Love. The most intense moment of desire, what we used to call a crush, when someone is totally obscure to us, we don't even know what the fuck is going on, or who they are, even, it's desire at that highest level. The knowing is just a bonus, it's a nod to the ongoing nature of the desire. Then you have to think about the whole power aspect. I don't know anything about love as regards power, except to say that love, when it's most intense, is probably also associated with simultaneous levels of insecurity and uncertainty. Of course, no one wants to think that their love is motivated by insecurity, people want Twilight-style love, though almost everyone who thinks about it eventually agrees that insecurity, and, in particular, the urge to possession, is the insidious part of romantic love. It's a trade-off in that way. Maybe love is just a moment, that's how I break it down, most of the time, I think: maybe it's a moment when you feel the greatest anticipation, an irrational but overwhelming certitude for future happiness, you're convinced that the world is opening itself up. When that feeling is connected to desire for another person in a sexual way, bam, that's love, that's the moment of love. But, maybe love is ongoing, it's something you do. We should stop using the word. Except that it'll disappoint people, and mislead them. So you have to use it, you have to thread that needle. That's it, that's all.