by Edcer Escudero
WHAT is love?
This question has been asked a thousand times before, but hasn’t been answered quite adequately at all.
It seems that the more one tries to define love, the more difficult the effort becomes. Love is so encompassing that no single definition can completely explain it.
“Love is a many-splendored thing” is the first line of a song of the same title. I think many will readily agree that that line is a good definition of love. People who have been in love know that it is so.
For, in a manner of speaking, a person in love feels that he/she is in heaven, and everything about him / her is beautiful. To a person in love, the world becomes forever bright and everything eternally rosy. Love sees no ugliness, because it is blind, says Shakespeare.
But the definition I find most accurate is the one that says that love is an over-powering force. Yes, so over-powering that a person struck by it goes on to defy rhyme and reason, custom and tradition rule and logic. In short, love conquers all – anybody and all odds, the whole world even.
Teen-age lovers Romeo and Juliet just couldn’t contain the force of love and chose death over the pain of separation.
But for sheer dream and intensity nothing can beat the abdication of a throne for the love of a woman by King Edward III of England who gave us his kingdom 1937 in exchange for an American divorcee. Now, what greater force is there than that? Imagine giving up all the power, the glory and the grandeur of a kingship for a second hand wife!
King Edward was later reduced to the rank of a Duke, but in the eyes of his beloved, he was still king – not of England, but the king of her heart. And that to Edward, was the greatest kingship of all.
As a driving force, love can catapult you to incredible heights of success, or drag you down to the deepest depth of sorrow.
Love can make you accomplish the impossible, do the bizarre, and commit the abominable.
A salesman in Texas, USA so loved his wife that he locked her in the basement of their house whenever he travelled out of town for business. Of course, he left her enough food to last for days.
In Denmark, a man had a unique way of disciplining his wife everytime she neglected some household chores. He tied her up in her room three hours a day. She confessed later that the punishment made her love her husband more, and that she felt grateful to him for his brand of discipline.
In Brazil, a two-timing wife prepared her husband’s favorite cake on his birthday. He thought it was sweet of her to do that. What he didn’t know, however, was that the icing on the cake had poison. Expectedly, the man died. And the woman lived happily ever after – with another man.
Love can destroy too. Take Samson, the biblical strongman who fell so madly in love with Delilah that he revealed to her the secret of his strength. Delilah promptly delivered him to the Philistines who captured Samson and chained him like an animal.
Love is a good equalizer. It bridges the gap between the rich and poor, the educated and the unlettered, the old and the young, the normal and the abnormal (the politically correct term now is differently abled).
We are too familiar with stories of the unequals – rich girls running away with poor boys, executives falling in love with their secretaries, priests marrying parish assistants, wealthy matrons messing their lives in affairs with their younger chauffeurs, teachers marrying their students, the blind marrying those who are ot.
Crazy? Illogical? Weird? Call it what you may, but the fact remains that the world go round. These strange things will happen again, and again, and again, and again.
Some psychologists say that love is a disease. Do you agree?
