Ideas of Love (लव)
Imtiaz Ali: "People start with a singular and fixed bollywood-esque idea of what love should be. Over time, they spend a lot of time trying to fit their relationship into that idea of love. This causes a lot of unnecessary guilt and resentment. What we are actually seeking in the act of loving, is a closer connection with ourselves".
Rougemont: "the West is in love with love's obstacles, not with any actual partner. Remove the obstruction and the passion dies. Love is in the chase".
Don Draper: "What you guys call love was invented by guys like me to sell more nylon".
Plato: "Humans were once whole, and got split. The search for your other half, is the search for love". - soulmate-core
Bell Hooks: "Love is a practice and love is a verb, that love is as love does".
Stendhal: Crystallisation - "the lover accretes imagined perfections onto their beloved, like salt crystals forming on a twig left in a mine" - love is productive hallucination that you maintain
De Beers group: A diamond is forever (unless its artificial).
Schopenhauer: Romantic passion is the species operating on you, the intensity calibrated to genetic fit, the spell lifting once reproduction is served
Rochefoucauld: Love is self-love wearing a costume, you adore the version of yourself you become in their gaze.
Sufism: Treat the human beloved as a mask for god, worldly longing are a stepping stone towards the divine.
Buddhism: metta - Attachment is the problem, practice warmth towards everyone and grasping towards no one.
"Love is the Drug, 2020": Attachment runs on chemistry - oxytocin for bonding, dopamine for the early craving, seratonin for the obssession. Prescribe MDMA to increase intimacy in couples therapy, and "anti-love" drugs to leave toxic relationships.
Bollywood:
- DDLJ - love is real when the family approves it.
- Tamasha - love makes you, you. But the relationship may not survive you becoming you.
Rom-coms: Enemies become lovers romantically and comedically.
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History (2005) - Marriage was an economic and political instrument, about land, alliances, labor and inheritance. Resting it on something as volatile as love is reckless, and even indecent. The 1700s made this volatile feeling the foundation of a durable institution. [If falling in love is the reason to marry, falling out of it is a reason to leave]
Justin Skycak: Love is perpetual hardcore effort. Not as a descriptor, but as a definition. Love is being consistently hardcore. To say that a parent loves their kid is to say that the parent is consistently hardcore about raising there kid. That their kid is always on their mind and they are always putting max effort into raising their kid.
Me: "It should be fun to talk to each other". The longing for a permenant conversation partner, to put it more romantically.
My past relationship feels like falling in love with the same person, but the definition of love keeps changing. It changed during the relationship. It changed every time we broke up and got together again. Whoever said there is closure in breakups is wrong, I keep wondering how it could have been different.
Do you ever get over that feeling that things could have been different, even after trying again and again to make them different from the last time? They are better than the last time, the previous mistakes have been corrected, leaving space for new ones. I don't see an end in sight.
The first time we dated, it was "Love is the Drug, 2020", Stendhal the second and third time. What I think she wanted was Plato and Rochefoucauld, and a hint of Early Taylor Swift.
She often asked me what love meant to me. I replied with the permenant conversation partner idea. She felt it was too simple. She planned activities on a sheet of paper - a list of questions like - "how would you love your partner, whats working, how can that improve", it was an attempt to understand the style in which we loved. She shared a list of things that she liked - a playbook to loving her. It had jhumkas, ceramics, flowers, handwritten letters, constant assuarances, poetry and observing details about her. I did not like it at first, It felt like they were instructions to be followed, and I was supposed to follow the instructions given by her. Is that better than not having instructions? Just doing what you do and praying its enough? It did not work the last time I tried, what now? Loving should not feel like a chore, and a task, right? We were good, kind, loving, non-toxic, and yet, here I am, heartbroken. We made attempts to understand how either of us loves and likes to be loved, and yet, it ended in exhaustion and hurt.
All these ideas of love, and none of them fit when you need them to.
Yours lovingly,
jevliska?