Is love a feeling? M. Scott Peck explains that love is not a feeling. Feelings are momentary states. Feelings are naturally directed towards objects and for that reason they are fleeting because the interest slowly subsides the moment that object no longer gives you the satisfaction. The same cannot be said about persons. A man’s attractive qualities – looks, a successful career, and money, do not last forever. To love a man is to go beyond such attributes. Only a man’s character is permanent. To love this person is to love him for who he is, not what he has.
People, of course, will try to project a beautiful image. In that way, one falls for that image, not the person. Projecting an image of oneself speaks a lot about one’s insecurities as an individual. We try to protect this image because we are uncertain about our true character. We are afraid of being judged. But that cannot be good in the long run. If a man or woman must be loved, it must be because of his or her character, not the image that he or she tries to project.
Success in a relationship, or marriage for that matter, is possible, people say, because of compromise. “To win in marriage, a man must learn how to lose,” is a thought that often comes to mind. But I think something is wrong if the same is only meant to please one party, and not really address the problems that couples face. In fact, you marry someone because you want to be with this person. So, win or lose, you must be together, and not only because you need one party to be happy.
Life is about the choices we make. The essence of making a choice is that it should make you happy. This is because you can only love someone if you are free. An honest man will never cheat. This is because there are moral consequences to our choices. If you love a woman, you would not want to hurt her. In this way, to love someone is at the same time to promise that she is and will always be the only one.
Shakespeare says that love is blind. The feeling hits everyone. You do not choose a person for his or her good qualities. You just fall in love, unmindful because as lovers, you refuse to see the negative attributes of the beloved. But what it actually means is that when you love a person, you are willing to let things past, turn a blind eye, because your love for this human being is far greater than any mistake that he or she can make.
But is love unconditional? Indeed, if you are in love, why put conditions? If you will set conditions, then you are not in love. Love is not contractual. You want to do what you want to do not because of a prior motive but because you see something beautiful that is happening. What that is depends not on the perception of other people. You will forgive every mistake, suffer through it all, because you value the other more than your own happiness.
Another curious question has something to do with the eternity of love. Gabriel Marcel says that the beloved will never die. The beloved does not die because the motive of love is this person, her whole being, the human soul, and not the physical body. So, even if the person is no longer present in the physical sense, love shall not perish. Marcel says that only the physical body dies but the bond between two souls lasts until the end of time.
But is love perfect? You cannot really love someone who is perfect. Perfection is an ideal. Every single individual that God has created has some form of an imperfection. Precisely, the gods invented love for us to find meaning in life. In the end, you do not need a complete human being. It is your love for each other that completes your being. It is about the laughter in every mistake. There’s always a bad day, but there’s always joy in being together
