Understanding Love

By

Randeep Wadehra

For some, love is a luxury that only the rich can afford. Anyway, the ugliness of poverty precludes any possibility of the blooming of such a delicate sentiment. Love needs to be nurtured with beautiful thoughts and surroundings that only money can buy.

LOVE is perhaps the only creed that is not normative — its followers make and observe their own norms. Love is a feeling that numbs all senses. It is an experience that heightens sensibilities. Love is a chemical reaction that involves pheromones. It is a spiritual function. Love is blind. It opens one’s eyes to an entirely different world. Love is profane — a thoughtless consummation of carnal desires — an all-consuming passion. Love is sublime — it prompts one to sacrifice one’s all without expecting anything in return — it is tranquility personified. Confused? Not surprising, really. It is a phenomenon involving curious contradictions. It has not been demystified despite the best, or is it the worst, efforts of poets, philosophers, scientists and ordinary folks.

Is love a function of the eye or the mind? One must first see the cherished ‘object’. If it matches the image that one carries in the mind, one is in love! Or at least that is what one believes. Now, if love is merely a function of pheromones, how does one explain one-sided love? And what about platonic love? Moreover, what prompts one to give up all worldly pursuits for one’s beloved? For example, the Duke of Windsor, who abdicated his throne in 1936, proclaimed, "I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love." Is that a mere chemical reaction?

While one pines for a glimpse of the beloved, the latter behaves as heartlessly as la belle dame sans merci. Surely chemical reactions are not selective to such a severe extent. Perhaps physical attraction has something to do with the crude sense of aesthetics, where the bodily aspect alone counts. Perhaps the Canadian economist and humorist Stephen Leacock is right in pointing out that men in love with a dimple often make the mistake of marrying the whole girl. American writer Helen Rowland’s remarks highlight a mother’s despair, "It takes a woman twenty years to make a man of her son, and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him." And then the ‘fool’ goes ahead and gets married, for is it not said that love ends where marriage begins? Not really, says the Swedish writer Ellen Key because love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.

Marital love has spawned its own brand of humour. One can quote from British writer Jennie Jerome Churchill’s His Borrowed Plumes:

"ALMA. I rather suspect her of being in love with him.
MARTIN. Her own husband? Monstrous! What a selfish woman!"

1 2 3 >>