LIFE’S LESSONS
By Henrylito D. Tacio
“I believe that two people are connected at the heart, and it doesn’t matter what you do, or who you are or where you live; there are no boundaries or barriers if two people are destined to be together.” – Julia Roberts
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Love, so they claim, will never be out of fashion.
Red roses, tender songs, pink missives, romantic day dramas, pedestalled Aphrodites and Adonises, young and old thoughts of companionship, love-aches or heartaches – all these manifest that nobody is incapable of loving, as well as being loved.
Hollywood movies with love in their titles abound: Love Story, Love in the Afternoon, Love Letters, When a Man Loves a Woman, Women in Love, and Love is a Many-Splendored Thing.
So, what is this thing called love?
To a poet, love makes a fitting subject for the sublimest, most moving of poetry – a force that inspires him to immortalize mortals, and to make his feelings and thoughts such works of art. Remember who penned the immortal line, “Drink to me only with thine love?”
William Shakespeare writes: “Love is not love which alteration finds or bends to the remover to remove.” John Dryden continues: “Pains of love be sweeter far than all other pleasures are.” Jim Vaus finishes it with these words: “When love is felt, the message is heard.”
To a psychiatrist, love is nothing but a neurosis – a disease of the mind and a malfunctioning of the nervous system that will disappear once one gets in closer contact with the practical world and reality.
Dr. Eric Fromm, a noted American psychoanalyst, explains: “Love is an active power in man; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow man, which unites him with others; love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity. In love, the paradox occurs that two human beings become one and yet remain two.”
Others see love as a rebellion. This is how Albert Camus, author of The Rebel, views the four-letter word. “The desire for possession is only another form of the desire to endure; it is this that comprises the impotent delirium of love,” he explained. “No human being, even the most passionately loved or passionately loving, is ever in our possession. On this pitiless earth where lovers are often separated in death and are always born divided, the total possession of another human being and communion throughout an entire lifetime are impossible dreams.
“The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself,” he continued. “To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves. The shamefaced suffering of the abandoned love is not so much due to being no longer loved as to knowing that the other partner can and must love again. In the final analysis, every man is devoured by the overpowering desire to endure and possess wishes that those whom he has loved were either sterile or dead. This is a real rebellion.”
That’s too serious a definition of love. Some famous people have been poking at this subject. “Love is like the measles, all the worse when it comes late in life,” English writer Douglas Jerrod says.
French novelist and philosopher Remy de Gourmont contends: “Man begins by loving love and ends by loving a woman; woman begins by loving a man and ends by loving love.”
American satirist H.L. Mencken points out: “Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.” Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock has this idea: “Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.”
American columnist Helen Rowland outdid both when she once wrote: “Love is woman’s eternal spring and man’s eternal fall.”
Despite all these, love is immortal. It lives forever. Listen to Eben Eugene Rexford in his “Silver Threads Among the Gold”: “Love can never grow old, locks may lose their brown and gold, cheeks may fade and hollow grow; but hearts that love will know. Never winter’s frost and chill, summer’s warmth is still in them.”
Love in the medical point of view
In recent years, American researchers have been taking a close look at the pathology of love. Their findings reveal that what most of us regard as a mysterious, ethereal force has certain definable psychological and physiological components. By understanding these components, we can form better love relationships and, equally important, recover faster from those that fail.
“Falling in love,” explains John Money, professor of medical psychology at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, “resembles what social scientists call ‘imprinting.’ That is to say, there already exist within each of us certain standards that reflect our family life, background and, in some cases, ethnic or racial heritage. Thus, when you encounter a particular type of perceptual stimulus – someone who fits these preconceived notions of what you need in a wife or husband – there’s a good chance you’ll fall in love.”
Former priest-turned columnist Bob Garon agrees. “One sure sign of deep love between two persons is the sensitiveness to each other’s needs,” he writes. “When two people fall in love, there is a desire to please that is born. The man perceives his beloved as very precious, somebody to cherish. So, he wants to do everything to keep his new-found love…
“When this sensitiveness is reciprocal, it is one of the driving forces that causes people to treasure each other,” Garon further writes. “Perhaps, it is because we all feel so important, so loved when another seems to be so in tune with us that he/she is aware of what we are thinking and feeling even if we never express our thoughts and sentiments.”
E. Merrill Root puts this in another way: “So far as I am concerned, I would never choose a woman unless I were sure she had also chosen me. I could not love a woman unless I felt in the depths of my being that she also loved me; I would wish her to seek me even as I sought her; were she not mad to have me I would be tepid to have her.”
Love and God
The Holy Bible gives us the real meaning of love in I Corinthians 13. Love, it says, is patient, kind, not jealous, not conceited, not proud, not ill mannered, not selfish, and not irritable. It does not keep a record of wrongs. It is not happy with evil but is happy with the truth. Above all, love never gives up.
This is what God’s love is all about. “God proved His love on the Cross,” writes Billy Graham. “When Christ hung, and bled, and died, it was God saying to the world, ‘I love you.’”
Genuine love is neither nonce-sense nor non-sense. It is a disciplined commitment to all that is good and true. It is willing to undergo some troubles in response to the spoken or unspoken needs of the other. As Og Mandino, author of the best-selling The Greatest Salesman in the World, aptly puts it:
“I will love the kings for they are but human; I will love the meek for they are divine. I will love the rich for they are yet lonely; I will love the poor for they are so many. I will love the young for the faith they hold; I will love the old for the wisdom they share. I will love the beautiful for their eyes of sadness; I will love the ugly for their souls of peace.”
Ah, love! – ###
