I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
I went out to dinner with an ex a few weeks ago. We hadn’t caught up in a long time. I didn’t know he’d been seeing someone for four years. It had been that long!
On the drive home, he told me ruefully, “We haven’t even said I love you yet.”
Then he amended, “Well, actually she said it to me last week.” (After four years! I thought).
“Did you say it back?” I asked.
He shook his head, “No, I couldn’t do it.”
I thought of another man I had dated, one I had even lived with for a time. He told me regularly, “I’ve never been in love.”1
He had been married for twenty years, and before he and I got together, he had dated someone seriously for three years. It was crazy to me that he felt he had never been in love.
I guess he didn’t think he had that with me either, as he didn’t ever tell me he loved me, except maybe once, and that was after his Ambien kicked in.
What does it mean, anyway, to be in love?
Buddhist psychotherapist and author David Richo, in How to be an Adult in Love, says that more than one ingredient goes into the I’m-in-love cocktail:
The in-love state is caring connection with dollops of adrenaline for excitement and oxytocin for pleasure. When only the caring connection remains, we say we love someone but are no longer in love. This may be the result of noticing that our partner no longer, or only occasionally, arouses our sympathetic nervous system and increases our heart and breathing rates. We may mistake such physiological arousal for love when it only ever signified fascination…. Since both falling in love and falling into fascination have exactly the same physical components, we can confuse them, especially when that first kiss makes us feel like we have at last come home, found what we always wanted, entered nirvana, and found our soul mate. Given the ecstatic feeling, it is understandable that we are not sure what is really happening.
“I need someone” plus “You are desirable and available” can feel like: “I am in love with you.”
To fall in love is often to fall for an apparent, but not necessarily accurate, matchup of our own need and our discovery of a person who will fulfill it. In the in-love state, we see a reflection of our own pleading longing in the other’s smile.
So: caring connection + fascination/infatuation/adrenaline = being in love?2
I wonder if my two exes are just expecting too much from the “being in love” state. Surely they felt infatuated and caring towards someone at the same time? Or were they thinking that their feelings did not go far enough? Perhaps they were looking for some sort of true love, and found what they were feeling at times inadequate to whatever their vision of that was.3
authentic love
Richo distinguishes authentic love from a projection or crush. He writes that someone who authentically loves you:
- Bases it on the reality of who you are
- Continues to love you through the vicissitudes of relating
- Is responsive to changes in you
- Remains aware of your shadow side (your less desirable qualities) and works with it creatively
- Seeks mutual fulfillment of needs
- Takes your presence or absence in stride
I notice that Richo’s description of authentic love applies in some ways to how a parent loves (or should love) a child, save perhaps for “mutual fulfillment of needs.” Generally speaking, parents don’t look to their children for fulfillment of needs; the support goes the other way. It’s also interesting to me that the two exes who claim never to have been in love as well do not have children—one by choice and one involuntarily.
Could raising children be a school for learning how to authentically love? Of course we have all heard stories of terrible parents who do not show love towards their children, do not accept their children for who they are, or even go so far as to emotionally or physically abuse them. But setting such dysfunction aside, for many people parenthood can be an excellent if difficult way to learn to appreciate others for who they are, to love them even when relating is tough, to work with their shadows creatively, and to respond to their growth and change.
I am not saying by any means that people without children can’t learn to authentically love. In my life, however, I didn’t know how to authentically love until I learned it by mothering my children. And even then it took me many years to get it right. I suppose I’m still trying to get it right, and not just with my children. I also practice it with my parents, my siblings, my closest friends, and, of course, my romantic partner.
what about true love?
So that’s authentic love, but what about true love? Maybe that’s what my exes were looking for. That is probably the most generous interpretation of their situation, that they are seeking something that is rare and hard to find. Sure, each of them has probably felt caring connection along with some level of infatuation at the same time. But both are men of high ideals, so perhaps such experiences didn’t meet their individual visions of the state of being in (true) love.
Is Richo’s authentic love the same as true love? To me they seem not the same. Richo’s authentic love is about how you behave while true love seems more like a blessing visited on you by the universe.
SPOILER ALERT! Maleficent movie.
One of my favorite movies is 2014’s Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie and Elle Fanning. It’s a live-action retelling of Sleeping Beauty that reconceptualizes true love. When Aurora is sleeping her cursed sleep that can only be ended with true love’s kiss, the prince’s kiss does not wake her. Instead, only the kiss of Maleficent, her substitute mother, wakes her. Maleficent brought great and authentic love to Aurora, not a feeling, but an orientation and a set of actions. I love this. True love isn’t just romantic love. True love, I believe, can take many forms: maternal, paternal, sibling, friendship, a child’s love for a parent.
is it just semantics?
In some sense it’s all just how we label it. Do you love someone? Are you in love? Have you ever experienced true love? If you say so.
I don’t mean to pick on my exes, but I want to figure out what’s up with their refusal to say they’ve ever been in love. Is it that the universe just hasn’t given them true love? Are their standards are too high? Is this some sort of syndrome among highly educated, intellectual men, that they don’t ever feel they are in love?
Could it be that online dating apps have raised their expectations for their eventual partner so high, that no real woman can ever match up to the goddess they can imagine?
Without talking to each of them more I will never know, I suppose.
I want to wrap this up with a quote from another book, Against Love by Laura Kipnis. She casts doubt on this activity of trying to define what love is:
The literature on love is vast. Advice books peddle hard work as the cure-all for faltering desire; all the others ask and answer the same question over and over: “What is love?” No answer appears to suffice, yet still it must be asked, and then asked again. If the definitional quandary stands in for something forever frustrating and forever promising at the core of the whole business, if there’s something inherent in the nature of human longing that defeats its own fulfillment—all the while offering fleeting moments of reverie and elusive glimpses of transcendence is what the social world does with all that frustration and all that promise.
Kipnis offers some ideas for what the social world can do with all that frustration and all that promise which I won’t review here. Instead I want to offer a possible explanation for my exes’ situation: Perhaps experiencing the pursuit of (true) love as both endlessly frustrating and endlessly promising is the default and the norm. Perhaps it’s not my exes who have it wrong, but me, thinking, “but you must have been in love at some time in your life!”
Maybe many people go without ever really being in love, especially if they hold themselves to the standard of “true love.” Perhaps there is “something inherent in the nature of human longing that defeats its own fulfillment,” as Kipnis says, and my exes are just giving words to this experience.
I don’t really think so though. I’m going to work through this more in an essay I’m working on called “the mathematics of love,” which is, incidentally, about one of these I’m-not-in-love men.
I believe the power to find true love is within a person, not outside of them.
- Now I’m wondering if there was an unstated second part to that: “And I’m not in love with you right now.” ↩︎
- Interestingly, the English word fascinate derives from the Latin fascinum. In ancient Rome, the fascinum was the embodiment of the divine phallus. ↩︎
- And probably they each had their own unique reasons for thinking “I’m not in love” at different times. But I think there may be a pattern here, among men similar to these two. ↩︎