Why We Love What We Love

Writing love poems is harder than you'd think.

Let me clarify that: writing honest love poems that do NOT make me gag is harder than you'd think. I abhor sap. I dislike love poems that don't sting just a little. Anyone who writes those kind of love poems has failed to capture the astounding range of love. Their 'violets are blue' sentimentality does the reader a disservice.

I'm in the process of writing my second book of poetry, Desir, a volume of love poems based on the four loves as understood by the ancient Greeks, and later redefined for modernity by C.S. Lewis: storge (affection), philia (friendship), eros (erotic love), and agape (unconditional, God-like love).

I find that writing about love is some of the most challenging writing I've done because of the amorphous nature of that emotion--the erotic melding into the platonic, or the platonic yielding to the erotic. Soaring, iridescent love as impressionism of the senses, fruition of memory, desire, and psychosis.

Why do we love the things and people that we love?

In writing about love, this question is almost more important, or certainly more interesting, than the expression of love itself. The apertures of erotic love, for instance--the yearning, the kiss, the embrace, the explosive desire--are universal. But why him or her? There is nothing more individual or singular than the trajectory to the beloved. How is it that two people with so much in common could find absolutely nothing to love in the other? How is it that two people with nothing in common can bind their lives together without much consideration?

I don't care about expressing how love makes an individual act, per se; I'm interested in reading and writing about how love melds the mind. I'm interested in exploring why we love the things and people we love in the first place. Is our choice of partner merely an expression of out "desire-mapping" through past experiences, media images, familial models, or is it more?

I don't know if I can believe in something as delicious as fate. I don't know that I can get behind something as idealistic as soul mates; and that really says something about me, doesn't it?

What I can believe in is this, at least: when we say 'I love you' or 'I love ___,' it says more about the person saying it than the object(s) of affection themselves. We are what we love. This can be both a wondrous and terrible revelation.

Precision of Language, Please

In the book, The Giver, a utopian society is architectured around community, efficiency, and politeness. Children are chastised for saying "I'm starving!" when what they meant to say is, "I'm hungry." Because of this push for precision, absolutes and extremes of feeling have fallen away from their vernacular almost entirely; so much so that the main character, Jonas, is admonished by his parents for asking "Do you love me?" They look at him, shocked by his foolishness, and bark, "Precision of language, please!" In their world, love is a word without meaning; they are as incapable of feeling love as they are in using the word itself. It is outdated, foreign in their mouths and in their hearts.

Is fiction so different than reality?

The word love has lost its meaning. Not from limitation or underusage--quite the opposite. 'Love' is in our mouths so much that it might as well be the same word for 'dinner' or 'sleep' or 'sock.' We use the same word to describe our feelings for pizza as we do our spouse. I love you. What does that phrase even mean anymore? It means I have an above average response to you. It means I enjoy the way you make me feel. It means I adore the way they have seasoned the crust on this Sicilian style pie.

I say we place a moratorium on the word 'love' for awhile.

The ancient Greeks had a complex, more comprehensive way of expressing love in their language. They understood 4 types of love: storge (affection), eros (erotic; being 'in love'), philia (friendship), and agape (unconditional, God-like love). Certainly these words lack the fluid quality of our English counterpart; 'storge' doesn't roll off the tongue like 'love' does. But if we adopted them into our vernacular, they could possibly enable us to evaluate our feelings with a little more consideration rather than sweeping them under that giant and complicated welcome mat we call love.