According to the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, the desire to love and be loved in return is an illusion. It appears that we only love because we also want to be loved. This is not supposed to be the case, Sartre thinks. You cannot love a person because you desire to be happy. Rather, it is enough to say that to love is to make the other free.
The desire to be with the other eventually is nothing more than a facade because what a person really wants is to be free. There is no assurance of happiness when you are in love because both of you will desire your endless freedom.
For Sartre, you are what the other person sees in you. This alienates you from your true self.
So, what happens is that you must give up your own freedom for the sake of the other’s happiness. Love, hence, is nothing but a paradox. However, this can be a form of self-deception. You are only hurting yourself the more you believe that you are loved by that person who actually cannot love you in return. For Sartre, you cannot love unless you deny yourself your own freedom and the other of hers, which makes that love almost impossible.
The only escape route, Sartre writes, is to be your authentic self. You must give up all that illusion in order to accept what love truly is. When you are no longer under that spell, then you can begin to act in good faith. In this way, you can be that authentic human being for someone and not just pretend to be somebody who only wants to be happy.
The existentialist philosopher Albert Camus writes that there is only one true duty and that is to love. Two people often find that mending a broken relationship is not worth all the time and effort, but it is the beauty of love to refuse to give in to a world that is never short of suffering. A man can choose to throw himself into the ocean, but he would not do so knowing that it would hurt the woman he loves. You cannot simply resign to a world that demands the repetition of your pain.
Camus tells us that the world is absurd. The world has no meaning without man, but to easily surrender is not what real courage is. Sisyphus will find no comfort in taking a day’s rest for to live is to embrace the reality of a terrifying world. If you love a woman, you must say to yourself that you are willing to go through wars a million times. Your task is not to escape your present but to define it. This is what living and loving is all about.
In fact, true love cannot be rooted in consistency. To be consistent is to project an image of oneself. That image is not the real you but the ideal of who you want to be. But man cannot be reduced into a mere file card, which is nothing but a collection of your good qualities. In loving a man or woman, however, we all know that one must love both the good and the bad.
Must people, then, resort to a compromise? What if two characters are irreconcilable? The basic point is that love cannot be reduced into contractual obligations. If you set a condition, then you are not in love. You simply want a sense of security out of that relationship. In truth, real love is a commitment, which means that it is rooted in a sacred covenant.
Finally, the French thinker Gabriel Marcel thinks of love as a living, eternal bond. It is an invitation, the appeal to the other – “Be with me.” Love, ergo, is that undying presence. Thus, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is right in saying that “there is no greater glory than dying for the woman you love” because that is the ultimate sacrifice. Love is endless. By this, Marcel meant that when two people are in love, only the physical body perishes, but their love for each other defies time and everything.
