Love, Part I

William R. Colagrande, MS

What is this thing called love? was Cole Porter’s rhetorical question and a fine question it is. Never in the course of human history has so much been said and written about a topic that is so little understood. Just stop to consider for a moment the phrase “falling in love.” When examined literally, you are immediately struck by the accidental quality this figure of speech implies, like falling down the stairs or slipping on the ice. Try as I might to come up with a similar example in the common parlance, I cannot. It seems as though nothing else is thought of in quite the same way as falling in love.

Well, is falling in love an accident? In a way it is. Even thought most people would say they want to fall in love or they are glad they have fallen in love, it is an involuntary process. No matter how much it may be desired, we can’t make ourselves fall in love. We can’t say Tonight I’m going to go out and fall in love and we certainly can’t make someone else fall in love with us (try as we might.) We can’t help falling in love either, which can be a particularly painful and troublesome event under certain circumstances.

Research indicates that there are definite biochemical changes that take place when people report having fallen in love. Are we the victims of our hormones? There is certainly a commonality in the way in which people describe how they feel when they fall in love and how they feel when they are under the influence of certain chemicals. There is the warm feeling all over, the sensation of floating on air, the sense of seeing clearly the answers to all of one’s personal and all of life’s mysteries, and a sense of completeness and well-being which has heretofore eluded us.

In attempting to understand the concept of “falling in love,” it is my theory that we may not be talking about love at all. What we refer to as love in this instance is really something akin to but quite distinct from love: it is passion. To use a cinematic reference, Michael Corleone is walking down the road in Sicily in the movie The Godfather, when, as his companions put it, he is hit by a “thunderbolt,” as he first sets eyes on his ill-fated wife Apollonia. “Falling in love” is being hit by a thunderbolt, but it is more about passion than love.

The primary difference between passion and love is that passion is exclusively our own: it is something we feel and experience for ourselves, for our own sake. Love, conversely, is something we feel toward another person. Passion, of course, requires an object for its focus, but what is being experienced is the passion itself, separate and apart from its object. In order to keep passion alive, we may be willing to subject the object of our passion to things that could strictly be considered selfish and even mean and therefore not loving at all.

But I don’t want to give the impression that I am making a case against passion. Passion is a wonderful thing. Part of its thunderbolt quality is that it opens us up in a way that we are not usually capable of doing or sustaining on our own. When we feel passion toward another, we are strongly motivated to open up to them, to move beyond the range of our normal comfort zone, to aspire to become more (and better) than we are. So we could say that passion positions us to explore the possibility of loving another person.

Now love does not always need to be an outcome of passion. Many people prefer passion to love, and, when the passion in a romance begins to wane, they will simply move on to await the next burst of passion with the next individual. But I do think that in most cases people usually do explore the possibilities of love when their passion has been aroused, especially when the experience of passion is mutual.

How do we account for passion? I mean what would make you feel passionate toward one person and not toward another? Some psychologists have speculated that we somehow unconsciously see and recognize aspects in the other that correlate with undeveloped or hidden aspects of ourselves that we, again unconsciously, seek to reconnect with. In other words, we recognize traits in the other that we know intuitively are the traits we need to reconnect with in order to become more fully ourselves. Often these hidden traits may have become hidden for a reason which accounts for why relationships, even good relationships, can sometimes be a bumpy ride.

So passion opens the door and love determines if we walk in and how long we remain. This confusion over passion and love, when not properly understood, often leads to trouble. A man, for example, upon noticing that passion has left the relationship, may construe this to mean it is time for him to move on. He may fail to understand the role which passion plays and begin to think he has made a wrong choice, particularly if he is aware of feeling an inkling of passion for somebody else. This is what we get for relying on the lyrics to country western songs and Robert Redford movies as our primary sources of information on the topic. (Why is he always cast opposite women half his age anyway? If somebody could explain that to me I’d appreciate it.) I used a man in my example not to pick on them but because they are more likely to engage in this type of thinking than women are. Women are usually more in tune with the inherent nature of love and are therefore less likely to fall into fallacy. I’ll have more to say about this in Love Part II.

2005

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