Love – in particular, romantic love – is an idea that is close to the human heart. Whatever the genre of human creative activity – novels, poetry, plays, songs, or films – you will find that love figures prominently. Google the word “love” and it gives an impressive 18.3 billion hits! By contrast, “hate” yields a measly 0.9 billion hits. The only word that comes closest to love in popularity on Google is “sex,” which garners an exciting 3.3 billion hits.
To complete the quartet, “God” scores a healthy 2.6 billion hits.
We are living in a time when statues are being dragged down from their pedestals all over the world and formerly established truths are being challenged. It is only appropriate, in such a time, that we take a closer look at our preoccupation with romantic love. I am fully aware that to question an idea that is considered even more sacred than the idea of the Divine may be seen as heretical. However, before I am condemned to be hanged on the altar of love, let me humbly declare that I myself am, even at three-score years, as much smitten by the magic of love as anyone else. Indeed, the desire for love has no age limit.
Yet what is this longing all about? Why is the perfect love so elusive? Why does our need for love have such a hold on us?
18th-century Lucknow depiction of two lovers
Many philosophers, poets and scholars have weighed in on these questions. I particularly like Aristotle’s view of love as “a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” In this view the quest for love is the quest for wholeness, a search for one’s missing half. Others have focused on the experience of being in love. According to Plato, “the madness of love is the greatest of heaven’s blessings.” Fast forward to modern times and we can find any number of song lyrics that describe the experience of finding (or losing) love. Here is one by Madonna:
Once upon a time
There was a boy
There was a girl
Hearts that intertwine
They lived in a different kind of world
For poetic descriptions of love and beloved we do not have to look beyond our own literary tradition. Mirza Ghalib, one of the greatest poets of Urdu, describes the contradiction inherent in the idea of love in this very witty couplet:
Mohabbat mein nahi hai farq, jeenay aur marnay ka
Ussi ko dekh kaar jeetay hain, jiss kafir pey daam niklay
[When in love, there is no divide between life and death
We live for the sight of the cruel beloved, and die for it too]
But enough said of the magic of love and our love of it. It is time to burst this balloon with a big red heart painted on it.
The problem with love is that it is a myth that we humans have taken it as real. At its core, what we want out of love is unconditional regard, that is, to be known fully and accepted, warts and all. But is anything ever unconditional in human relationships?
We are conditioned to believe in the power of the magical words, “I love you.” When a character in a novel or a film utters those words, everything is supposed to change and the lover and beloved are expected to live happily ever after. But in reality, things don’t turn out this way. As the lover and the beloved spend more time together, they find that life is a complicated and difficult business that strongly affects their behaviour and attitudes. Once the initial wave of emotion and sexual desire subsides, boredom can set in and threaten the feeling of togetherness that once was a given. Over time, it becomes more and more difficult to sustain a romantic relationship. As the song goes, “Baby, the thrill is gone.” We all have provided a shoulder to weeping friends who have felt abandoned by a partner who no longer loves them. Some may seek out others to feel the thrill of romance again which further contributes to the deterioration of the primary relationship. Everyone resorts to blaming the other or some external factor for their problems. Nowhere in this is it ever considered that so-called romantic love is a myth – a fantasy that helps us survive the painful realities that we confront in life.
It would be fine if a few tears were shed due to the loss of love, and life moved on. But such disappointments can have a severe impact on one’s mental health. Perception of failure in matters of the heart can damage one’s self esteem and lead to self-destructive behavior, even suicide. So how does one ever get out of this predicament? By reaffirming one’s faith in the ideal of love. That way, even if we were disappointed in love once, the possibility that we may still find the perfect love keeps us going.
Similarly, it takes a kind of faith to believe in the idea of God. The believers maintain that God is infinitely kind, generous, all knowing and intimately involved in our day to day life. But why do we need God in the first place?
This particular need – to believe in the Divine – is apparently unique to humans. Humans are also one of the few species with the ability to be self-aware or conscious of itself. A direct result of consciousness is imagination. Imagination seeks answers to the questions relating to both the physical and mental world like why the sky is blue or what is the purpose of our presence in the world. The brain is confronted with thousands of such questions. Those who are more self-aware are plagued by these questions while others may not even acknowledge them. Meanwhile, unpleasant things are happening to us for which we have no answers: Why did the rains flood our house, what caused the death of a child, why is there sickness and pain?
Since it is hard for us to live with so much uncertainty we need foundations to which we can anchor our lives. So the idea of a God connects us to something much bigger than our immediate world and makes us feel secure. With God comes religion and a notion of an afterlife that counters the fear of death. It also comes in handy when undesirable things that happen to us become bearable when we attribute them to God’s will.
Such ideas like love and God appear necessary for humans to survive in this complex world. But the problem starts when we extend them into the process of formulating rules of social and personal behaviour.
In the case of romantic love, there are sky-high expectations of fidelity, unquestioned emotional support, tenderness and affection. With the limited supply of emotional energy that humans possess it is impossible to meet such demands. Meanwhile, such rules relating to the Divine result in organised religion, which in turn leads to ever more grand ways of displaying one’s religiosity and to claims of the superiority of one’s own system of religious beliefs over those of another.
Love brings an added dimension of complexity compared to other myths. In the case of religion, the Divine is not seen or heard and exists as an object of faith. This type of relationship has a far greater chance of success than romantic love, in which both participants are flesh and blood and thus the interactions are fully two way. Some religious traditions have tried to combine the human and the divine to arrive at a perfect unity of the two. Thus are born the Sufi tradition that claims that both the lover and the beloved are within us. The Rastafari philosophy also advances the idea of “seeing it in the one drop.”
The need for romantic love is not the only one creating behavioral problems. Take the notion of truth, for example. Truth is greatly admired yet we are not comfortable with the idea that there are no absolute truths in the universe when it comes to human behaviour. Like beauty, truth also lies in the eye of the beholder. Truth is relative to the place, time and circumstances of human existence. It is also intimately tied to power, as power becomes the arbiter in establishing a notion as true. The only kind of truth that can possibly be considered immutable are scientific facts but these, too, change over time with changes in thinking about phenomena and ways of measuring them.
All of this is not to say that we should do away with the concepts of love, religion or truth. Given how our brains are designed, we cannot throw out these concepts voluntarily. Either a surgical procedure is needed to remove the part of the brain that is responsible for such thoughts, or we must create a new variety of humans that is not under the spell of these myths. It is not so much the scientists as the fiction writers who have imagined worlds where hard reason and logic prevail. Aldous Huxley has created such a world in his book Brave New World. Here humans feel no pain and have no need for love and affection, while still enjoying good food and free sex. Babies are custom-made in factories and raised differently for the specific purpose they are intended to serve in society. Any anxiety is taken care of by popping a pill. The French novelist Michel Houllebecq talks of a world where humans keep cloning themselves and live a hedonistic life without getting emotional about anything. Thus, perfect peace is maintained and there is no pain and suffering.
Personally, I say Amen to such a world. However, I will also personally keep up my quest for perfect romantic love until my dying day, and may God help me!
