There’s no form of economic activity that can be completely divorced from the finite materials provided by the Earth, regardless of who governs it: Wealth is intrinsically tied to material resources.
There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation of our engagement with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners, with everyone we choose to love. While we will necessarily behave differently depending on the nature of a relationship, or have varying degrees of commitment, the values that inform our behavior, when rooted in a love ethic, are always the same for any interaction.
No doubt it was someone playing the role of leader who conjured up the notion that we “fall in love,” that we lack choice and decision when choosing a partner because when the chemistry is present, when the click is there, it just happens—it overwhelms—it takes control. This way of thinking about love seems to be especially useful for men who are socialized via patriarchal notions of masculinity to be out of touch with what they feel. In the essay “Love and Need,” Thomas Merton contends: “The expression ‘to fall in love’ reflects a peculiar attitude toward love and life itself—a mixture of fear, awe, fascination, and confusion. It implies suspicion, doubt, hesitation in the presence of something unavoidable, yet not fully reliable.” If you do not know what you feel, then it is difficult to choose love: it is better to fall. Then you do not have to be responsible for your actions.
Even though psychoanalysts, from Fromm writing in the fifties to Peck in the present day, critique the idea that we fall in love, we continue to invest in the fantasy of effortless union. We continue to believe we are swept away, caught up in the rapture, that we lack choice and will. In The Art of Loving, Fromm repeatedly talks about love as action, “essentially an act of will.” He writes: “To love somebody is not just a strong feeling—it is a decision, it is a judgement, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go.” Peck builds upon Fromm’s definition when he describes love as the will to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, adding: “The desire to love is not itself love. Love it as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” Despite these brilliant insights and the wise counsel they offer, most people remain reluctant to embrace the idea that it is more genuine, more real, to think of choosing to love rather than falling in love.
We are all capable of changing our attitudes about “falling in love.” We can acknowledge the “click” we feel when we meet someone new as just that—a mysterious sense of connection that may or may not have anything to do with love. However it could or could not be the primal connection while simultaneously acknowledging that it will lead us to love. How different things might be if, rather than saying “I think I’m in love,” we were saying “I’ve connected with someone in a way that makes me think I’m on the way to knowing love.” Or if instead of saying “I am in love” we said “I am loving” or “I will love.” Our patterns around romantic language are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.
We can only move from perfect passion to perfect love when the illusions pass and we are able to use the energy and intensity generated by intense, overwhelming, erotic bonds to heighten self-discovery. Perfect passions usually end when we awaken from our enchantment and find only that we have been carried away from ourselves. It becomes perfect love when our passion gives us the courage to face reality, to embrace our true selves. Acknowledging this meaningful link between perfect passion and perfect love from the onset of a relationship can be the necessary inspiration that empowers us to choose love. When we love by intention and will, by showing care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility, our love satisfies. Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.
“Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure was more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work . . .”
when we commit to true love, we are committed to being changed, to being acted upon by the beloved in a way that enables us to be more fully self-actualized. This commitment to change is chosen. It happens by mutual agreement. Again and again in conversations the most common vision of true love I have heard shared was one that declared it to be “unconditional.” True love is unconditional, but to truly flourish it requires an ongoing commitment to constructive struggle and change.
Writing about choosing solitude over company that does not nurture one’s soul, Maya Angelou reminds us that “it is never lonesome in Babylon.”
On his deathbed Erich Fromm asked a beloved friends why we prefer love of death to love of life, why “the human race prefers necrophilia to biophilia.” Coming from Fromm this question was merely rhetorical, as he had spent his life explaining our cultural failure to fully embrace the reality that love gives life meaning.
Psychoanalysis has taught us something about the death wish that pervades the modern world. We discover our affluent society to be profoundly addicted to the love of death. . . . In such a society, though much may officially be said about human values, whenever there is, in fact, a choice between the living and the dead, between men and money, or men and power, or men and bombs, the choice will always be for death, for death is the end or the goal of life.” Our cultural obsession with death consumes energy that could be given to the art of loving.
“the via positiva”: “Without this solid grounding in creation’s powers we become bored, violent people. We become necrophiliacs in love with death and the powers and principalities of death.” We move away from this worship of death by challenging patriarchy, creating peace, working for justice, and embracing a love ethic.
Americans spend more than thirty billion dollars a year on security. When I have stayed with friends in these communities and inquired as to whether all the security is in response to an actual danger I am told “not really,” that it is the fear of threat rather than a real threat that is the catalyst for an obsession with safety that borders on madness.
“During the memorial service for her sister my friend gave testimony in which she declared ‘death has left us loving her completely.’ We are so much more able to embrace the loss of intimate loved ones and friends when we know that we have given our all—when we have shared with them that mutual recognition and belonging in love which death can never change or take away. Each day I am grateful for having known a love that enables me to embrace death with no fear of incompleteness or lack, with no sense of irredeemable regret. That is a gift you gave. I cherish it: nothing changes its value. It remains precious.” Loving does this. Love empowers us to live fully and die well. Death becomes, then, not an end to life but a part of living.
Accepting death with love means we embrace the reality of the unexpected, of experiences over which we have no control. Love empowers us to surrender. We do not need to have endless anxiety and worry about whether we will fulfill our goals or plans. Death is always there to remind us that our plans are transitory. By learning to love, we learn to accept change. Without change, we cannot grow. Our will to grow in spirit and truth is how we stand before life and death, ready to choose life.
“In that calmness we begin to understand that peace is not the opposite of challenge and hardship. We understand that the presence of light is not a result of darkness ending. Peace is found not in the absence of challenge but in our own capacity to be with hardship without judgement, prejudice, and resistance. We discover that we have the energy and the faith to heal ourselves, and the world, through an openheartedness in this movement.”
Irish journalist Nuala O’Faolain writes about the life-saving nature of books, declaring, “If there was nothing else, reading would—obviously—be worth living for.”
