1γ. Sub-wording ‘love’

Before laughing at the trite usage of ‘love’ to provide, once again, an answer to all questions regarding the universe and our life, we must admit we will feel puzzled if asked to explain what ‘love’ is. We love our family, we love our lovers, we love our pets, we love our friends and we love our property. In these five cases we use the word ‘love’ to describe five different qualities of ‘un-worded feelings’ that still resemble to each other, confirming the failure of the language to properly communicate the existing disparity.  A source of confusion is created so that when thinking starts building its constructs these are nothing more than new dead-ends in a dark labyrinth.   Different in each case, these five ‘loves’ share the same  ingredient, being contaminated by the ‘need’ of our family, of our lovers, of our pets, of our friends and of our property. As our existence is condemned to loneliness and exposed to insecurity we ‘need-love’ our surrounding that supports us, covers our needs, produces and sustains our descendants. On the other hand, any factor that endangers our status attracts our ‘hatred’, demanding elimination of the threat. This is in fact a ‘need-hatred’ emotion, as it fulfills our need to stay safe.

We, therefore, use the word ‘love’ to declare our need for someone or something at the same time believing that this is the purest emotion one can boast that he feels. But this is not true. There is no purity in an emotion founded on the personal need. You can easily stop loving your parents when they stop caring about you or when they express their preference to another family member. You can easily switch your emotions to hatred against a lover who no longer wants you and, you can easily stop loving a pet that turns against you.  

Sub-wording ‘love’ through thinking is essential to rebuild a large part of our constructed emotional world that, once founded on words of unclear significance, keeps misguiding our thinking. Love-hatred emotion is the foundation for the build-up of our emotional world that defines also our activity in life, so that sub-wording and clarifying the word ‘love’ is an essential step to cross the labyrinth.  Adolescents discover ‘love’ and dive into relationships committing themselves with vows of eternal devotion. This type of love appears to be one of the most beautiful and pure feeling man can experience… till one day they discover that another person is more ‘suitable’ to live with. The ‘betrayed’ member of the couple will start feeling the treason and blaming who was responsible for the destruction of a ‘pure’ bond. All these constructs created from the erroneous perception of the word ‘love’ can be re-built if ‘love’ is given the proper meaning. Understanding that components of ‘love’, in this case, those that mean need to have a partner to alleviate loneliness and fulfill sexuality, would immediately make us recognize and accept the right of a person to revise his decision about who is the best to cover these needs. Who is the ‘best’, is time and space dependent. The component of ‘love’, deprived of our personal need, that simply cares about the happiness of our partner (wherever and with whoever he is) would never be a source of sadness and depression but on the contrary, a source of happiness if our partner is happy with his decision.

Similar breakage of the various words ‘love’ to their components can be made. We can break the ‘love to our God’ to components of need, fear and gratitude and realize what we mean by saying ‘I love God’. We mean we need a power to protect us, we fear a power that can punish us, we blame a power that makes us feel pain, we tickle a power hoping that we will live for ever or we feel gratitude to a power that simply made us feel the world. By doing this we can realize how much pure is our love to God and how much selfish and egocentric is our way of believing. This can reshape our entire construct on the ‘love of God’.

Religious or atheist, we say we love the humanity. But this should be broken into meanings not always that pure as boasted. We are poor and we fight for a better distribution of the wealth so that we can ameliorate our position, we question the authority of a cast and we fight to replace this by the new one where we belong, we devote our action to help who suffers to receive the admiration of the society or we commit ourselves to the serving of humanity rejecting any benefit that comes from it. 

It seems that ‘love’ is indeed a key word that once properly understood and sub-worded contributes to the re-construction of basic paths in our way of thinking, to the re-shaping of the meaning we give to our existence and also to the way we chose to act in this world.