Love is something we <i>do</i>

Love is something we do

Posted on April 7th, 2009 by Frank Wilson

I brought my column last week to a close by quoting Oscar Wilde’s quip that “to fall in love with oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” I cited it in connection with how I felt about myself, and this may have struck some as a wondrous exercise in narcissism.

But there is a difference between self-love and narcissism. The myth of Narcissus has nothing to do with self-love and everything to do with self-image. Any sense of self Narcissus had was strictly skin deep. As for self-love, without a measure of it, it is doubtful if one can begin to love anyone else.

I make no apology for liking myself. If I didn’t I’d have no reason to expect anybody else would. This hardly means I am uncritical of myself or unaware of my faults, limitations, and shortcomings. If only it were so.

No one would love anybody — or be loved — if perfection were a prerequisite for loving. True, when we fall in love, our passion transmogrifies even the beloved’s faults into virtues.

But anyone who lives long enough and matures to any degree discovers that falling in love and loving are hardly the same. Falling in love may, if it goes well, bring ecstasy and, if not, misery, but either way it requires little effort on our part. It just happens, like an infection. The term lovesick is more than a poetic trope.

Still, while falling in love may be, at bottom, glandular, there is also a dimension to love that clearly transcends mere biology. Montaigne said that the only reason he could give to explain his love for his friend Étienne de La Boétie would be to say “because it was he, because it was I.” A genuine encounter is more than a conjunction of bodies. It is a meeting of persons.

The miracle of love is not that it happens, but that it can grow ever deeper. In fact, love at its truest is active, not passive, not something that happens to us, but something that we do.

Principally, it involves willing the good for the other, which means affirming the other’s freedom. As La Rouchefoucauld put it: “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” Infatuation may cause us to see the beloved as better than she is, but love lets us see her exactly as she is and to love her precisely for that. Her foibles and even her shortcomings come to seem precious because they are so much a part of her. For when we really love, we relish the character of the beloved for its own sake.

I think the perfect image of love is to be seen when a mother and a very young boy are together by themselves. I don’t often agree with Freud, but I think the old fellor was right on the money when he said, “If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.”

This was certainly true in my own case. I was aware from a very early age that my mother loved me. And I am convinced that this gave me a measure of confidence that has proved talismanic against whatever disappointments and misfortunes have come my way — or will come my way — in life. The philosopher Schopenhauer and his mother never got along. She was high-spirited and light-hearted, but doesn’t seem to have cared much for her son. He was a sourpuss and detested her. Whether this accounts for his pessimism is hard to say. But it surely accounts for his misogyny, fully on display in his diatribe “On Women.”

For Schopenhauer, love and the sexual impulse are the same thing, a treacherous trap on the part of nature, expressing merely “the will of the species for survival.”

It is hardly surprising he felt this way. You cannot feel love if you have never felt loved.

That’s What He Said is published on Tuesdays.