Love: Looking for pain

Love has been depicted since prehistoric eras, as seen in “The Lovers”, a Swedish cave painting that dates around 1000 BC. This Bronze Age painting depicts two red figures, embracing each other holding hands. An image that continues to be shown in the media as a mainstream representation of love. 

THE LOVERS
Artist Unknown
Sweden, Bronze Age, c. 1000 BC
In situ, Vitlycke, Bohuslän

 Love, defined in Eastern and Western cultures, will often gravitate towards a verb. Love is an action, a choice, an act of will. If seen as a noun, Love is a name for something that resides outside of our identity, and has its own agency. Thus, Love is something you can find outside of your own perception. Whether it is a verb or a noun, Love will be intertwined with our life experiences. How often have we heard that love will find us when we stop looking. That love will arrive when you least expect it. When we stop looking for Love, it will remove us from the active persona, and we become passive characters in our own love life. Implying that one must stop looking for love to find it is an oxymoron, you cannot find something that you have not looked for, or something you are not missing.

Feminism, defined as “a theoretical enterprise and a political program aimed at promoting a certain form of equality between man and women.”(Garcia) also explores the history of female submission. In her book, We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives, Manon Garcia explores how the patriarchy thrives on female submission. The implications of female submission will result in the silencing and depreciation of female experience (Garcia). In philosophy, submission has been seldom tackled, because of its deep complexity. Rousseau’s commentary on submission states “To renounce one’s freedom is to renounce one’s quality as a man, the rights of humanity, even its duties. There is no possible compensation for someone who renounces everything. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature, and to deprive his will of all freedom is to deprive his actions of all morality.” Yet female submission has been historically reinforced by the patriarchy, submission has been prescribed as the natural state for women (Garcia). Renouncing your own sense of agency goes deeply against human nature, yet it is perpetuated not only in the realm of our patriarchal society, but in our sense of identity. Submitting to the idea that Love will find you, not the other way around, you are denying yourself the right to actively participate in a search for meaning and care in a relationship with another individual. Keeping in mind that there are also philosophical approaches that suggest that women are submissive by nature due to their childbearing roles, the reinforcement of female submission has generated a gap between women and their proactivity in society (Garcia). Maintaining a submissive power dynamic disempowers women to play an active role in their search for love.

The etymology of the word “find” tells us the following: it comes from old English ‘findan’ which stems from German roots that defined find as a way or a path the roots are Greek from the verb “to go”. In Platos’ Symposium, Aristophanes tells the story of how humans were created through fantastic anthropology. Aristophanes accounts that we were originally round organisms, made up of two people joined together. Due to their spherical shape, they rolled together until they got ambitious and attempted to roll up to Olympus with the gods. After their act of rebellion, Zeus cut the sphere in half, and humans have been searching for their other half ever since. Aristophanes said, “each of us is perpetually hunting for the matching half of himself.”1 (191d). Although there are insurmountable amounts of pain in searching for an equal part that completes you, there is pain in finding that other missing piece. “All desire is for a part of oneself gone missing, or so it feels to the person in love.” (Carson, 31). The other-half approach to love has been severely criticized by modern psychology, due to its connotation of an “incomplete” individual without love. 

Like Plato’s spheres parting in half, two individuals who must find themselves in one another. Through literature, I have slowly come to the realization that love implies suffering, whether you have lost love, in love, out of love, or looking for love. Neuroimaging studies have shown that parts of the anterior cingulate cortex in human brains have a reaction to emotional pain related to heartbreak, that same area of the brain is responsible for physical pain (Eisenberger). Sensory components of emotional pain have been even treated with Tylenol (acetaminophen). An experiment in which participants were prescribed Tylenol for their emotional distress and others a placebo pill demonstrated that love physically hurts. “After Day 9, people who took the pain pill reported significantly lower levels of hurt feelings than those who took a placebo.” (Dewall). Love can cause physical pain as well as psychological distress, yet humans are consistently looking for it, or avoiding looking for it in order to receive it. The mind games, sacrifices, and heartbreaks that tag along loving someone are often outshined by the joys of a newly wed couple or a teenager in love. 

When Love is an action, it becomes a sacrifice as well. Love has its own opportunity cost, whether it is during a loving relationship or in the aftermath of a heartbreak, the individual who is participating in it will be giving up their next best choice for Love. Love as a sacrifice has been present throughout history as well, Merloo points out that pre-Columbian times, sacrifices were acts of love: “Many of those ancient sacrifices were done voluntarily out of “love” to the deity.” (Merloo, 81). Aren’t we all in constant sacrifice for those we love? In Hooks’ All About Love, she remarks “In patriarchal culture men are especially inclined to see love as something they should receive without expending effort. More often than not they do not want to do the work that love demands. When the practice of love invites us to enter a place of potential bliss that is at the same time a place of critical awakening and pain, many of us turn our backs on love.” (Hooks). Reciprocal love requires constant action, self- introspection, and a back and forth between pain and joy. That is the bittersweetness of love, which has also been discussed by the Greeks. In Greek mythology, Love was described as sweet-bitter (yes, bittersweet but backwards). That implies that love is sweet before it becomes bitter, yet it will continue to be a constant play between pleasant and unpleasant emotions.

The language we utilize to express our love and talk about love will perpetuate the perspective we have on Love. Take love as a verb and apply it, shift it, move it, go after it. “How different things might be if, rather than saying ‘I think I’m in love,’ we were saying ‘I’ve connected with someone in a way that makes me think I’m on the way to knowing love.’ Or if instead of saying ‘I am in love’ we say, ‘I am loving’ or ‘I will love.’ Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.” (Hooks). Our cognitive processes are rooted in the language we utilize to name our feelings (Kircanski), we can only understand love as far as we understand the language we utilize around it.  Love as a verb conveys deeper meaning and empowers those who are looking for it to create it. When utilizing love as a verb, it celebrates the search for love, as an active choice to find comfort in another’s embrace. The etymology of love begins as care and desire in Proto-Indo-European cultures. In old English, love appeared as a noun to be then transformed into a verb. And although our typical representation of love might portray it as a joyful, blissful experience, you might not experience it as you’d expect because love is a multifaceted experience that requires deep human suffering and sacrifice, whether or not you have searched for love or stumbled upon it.