Falling in love or being in love can be one of the greatest experiences in a person's life and it can also be one of the most destructive. What is this compelling force that brings us our greatest joys and most dreadful sorrows? I will briefly go into detail about the nature of love. I will reference two thinkers in the discussion of love, Harry Frankfurt and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Identity and Care
In Frankfurt's book, 'the Reasons of Love,' he discusses what it means to love someone. We care for the interests of our love intrinsically, meaning that we care about our love independent of any selfish gain or other motivation. We value the thing we love just because it exists.
Loving someone or something essentially means or consists in...taking its interests as reasons for acting to serve those interests. (Frankfurt 2004, RoL 37)
We begin loving the things that we love because we are struck by their value, and we continue to love them for the sake of their value. (Frankfurt 2004, RoL 38)
We care about it not as merely a means, but as an end...the nature of loving that we consider its objects to be valuable in themselves and to be important to us for their own sake. Love is...a disinterested concern for the existence of what is loved, and for what is good for it. (Frankfurt 2004, RoL 42)
The value of our beloved is out of our control, hence the expression 'falling in love.' We necessarily develop an identity relationship with our beloved: the person or thing we love become an extension of our self. When good things happen to that which we love, we feel good, when bad things happen, it causes us turmoil.
A lover identifies himself with what he loves...The fact that he cares about his beloved as he does means that his life is enhanced when its interests prevail and that he is harmed when those interests are defeated. (Frankfurt 2004, RoL 61)
The element of care and identity is essentially important in an accurate understanding of what love is and what it means. The identity relationship that we develop with the person we love forms as a representation in our minds and depending on how the person acts, they will either conform to our representation or go against it. When the person is in line with the representation, things are great, when they do things that we do not identify with, the seeds of 'falling out of love' become planted.
Some people's commitment to the representation of their lover can be so strong, even when the other person becomes unsafe they delusionally hold on to the meaning of what the person one was, despite how poorly they act. Coming to terms with the reality of who is person is and how they are not the representation in our minds is the way we break from an unhealthy relationship.
The Project and Enterprise
In 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre, a French philosopher, discussed the nature of consciousness and being where he touched on the topics of love in his book, 'Being and Nothingness.' Sartre first discusses that loving someone is an 'enterprise' or a project of my self; meaning that we engage in a journey like decision when we act on the love we feel for another. This enterprise, through the objectification and subjection of the lover and beloved, will lead us to growth and expressions of our self through our capacity of consciousness.
Love is an enterprise...an organic ensemble of projects toward my own possibilities...Love as the primitive relation to the Other is the ensemble of the projects by which I aim at realizing this value (Sartre 1984 , BoN 477)
The element of love as an enterprise is important for even though we may not control our feelings of love for people, we can chose who we will enact out love for. Some people may not be good for us as I discuss in the Social Safety Tool. A person who we love and supports us in becoming the kind of person we aspire to, that is safe, is the best kind of person to engage in the enterprise or journey of love with.
Choosing love for reasons such as social status, money, or other things we 'get' from the relationship is not actually love. We would not be in love with the person, but actually be in love with the things we get from the person.
In the Habits of Effectiveness Tool, I review Steven Covey's book 'the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.' In the second habit, Begin with the End in Mind, Covey discusses the nature of centeredness and how our values are shaped by the core of our identity. It is important to have a sense for why we are engaging in a relationship with someone and not violating elements of the Ethical Intimacy code, see Tool, of using a person as a means to and end.
As Frankfurt states above, the lover identifies with the beloved, so if we want to avoid issues in the future and problems of an incoherent self, see Unity of Self Tool, we would be best to love a person not for what we get from them but for who are they are and how they support our growth.
We can have other kinds of intimate relationships with people that are limited and not full expressions of an identity relationship like one based on sexual attraction but not personal growth. It is not problematic to have these relationships as long as we do not confuse them for true love as an identity relationship.
The simplest test of the degree of love within these limited relationships would be to find a person of equivalent sexual attractiveness but offers the kind of growth we want. I would hypothesize that the person that we more fully identify with that meets our need we will love more than the one who only meets our sexual needs.
We are not necessarily bound to monogamy, for loving more than one person can yield greater support if we can follow the ethical intimacy code for open relationships. Some people are more comfortable with monogamy but others are not. Open relationships is a more sophisticated method of intimacy that is discussed in the Open Relationships Tool.
The notion of “ownership”...is not actually primary...the man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved...the lover does not desire to possess the beloved as one possess a thing..He wants to possess a freedom as freedom. (Sartre 1984 , BoN 478)
Object Transcendence
The essence of what it means to be in love with someone is a fundamental element of two conscious beings intertwining their consciousness' and establishing meaning of the person beyond the object of a human as a thing in front of them. The loved person's meaning transcends, or goes beyond, the given information of a physical body in the presence of another.
Object transcendence is the nature of being in love and the essential property of sustaining that love. The representation of the person we love in our minds, the identity relationship and the feeling of being in love, is upheld by this mode of transcendence that Sarte discusses. The idealization or feeling of being in love with the person will become depreciated when the other acts or behaves in ways that we do not identify with, or that contrasts to the representation we have in our minds.
As the person continually acts in ways that go against our identified view of them, we begin to love the feeling of 'being in love' that we first had. This is where the Social Reports Tool is extremely useful to maintain the feeling of being in love with the person we value. We can communicate and grow together such that our identification, object transcendence, feeling of 'being in love' are not depreciated as challenges in life occur.
Some people may be lucky enough to have acquired the personal skills and matched themselves with an individual who compliments them in such a way that they naturally do this on almost automatically. However, basing one of the most important parts of your life on luck may not be the best decision. Take control of your capacity to retain your love for one another by communicating and growing together.
Love can offer a tremendous element of motivation and growth for an individual to fulfill the representation within another who supports them in becoming the kind of future self the person want to become and the lover envisions. Love can give a person the emotional motivation to see beyond their own present self towards a greater future self through the eyes of those that love them. Learning how to focus the emotional energy from the people who love us can give us the acceptance and support to overcome our greatest weaknesses and meet our most daring challenges. As great as the power love from another can be, we must create a foundation of self-love to not become dependent on the approval of others.
As time passes and people grow, there is the change that people may grow apart or their needs change. Even if this happens and the conditions of one's relationship change, as long as all parties involved remain socially safe, they can still participate in each others' lives in some form. The maturity to acknowledge our love for an other independent of selfish needs allows us to keep that person in our life and find others to grow with in ways we could not know until we experience it. Commitments are important, but ultimately we must have a commitment to our self that only we hold the power to keep or break.
The object which the Other must make me be is an object-transcendence, an absolute center of reference around which all the instrumental-things of the world are ordered as pure means...the condition of all valorization and the objective foundation of all values (Sartre 1984 , BoN 481)
The real goal of the lover insofar as his love is an enterprise...a project of himself...he perceives the lover on the ground of the world, transcends him, and utilizes him (Sartre 1984 , BoN 484)
The nature of love is simple once we get a grasp of these concepts. We can find people that are good for us and nurture those relationships. Keeping in mind what love really is, we can allow the forces of the cosmos to flow naturally and influence the degree of control we have in the right place without suffering unnecessarily.
AJ 9.2.18, 14.3.18, 23.8.18, 27.3.20
Amazon Link to Frankfurt's 'the Reasons of Love':
ISBN: 9780691126241
Amazon Link to Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness': https://www.amazon.ca/Being-Nothingness-Jean-Paul-Sartre/dp/0671867806/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1518138918&sr=8-1&keywords=9780671867805&dpID=41RQcP5Qo8L&preST=_SY264_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch
ISBN: 978-0-671-86780-5
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