Love
Love...
So many human acts, crazy acts, unjust, just, random, even evil acts, are justified under the banner of love. What amazes me is how powerful it is, as a justification. Its power to heal and turn everything into something good and how it takes over all other human emotions. What keeps a mother forgiving an ungrateful child? Love. What keeps a working man in a 9 to 5 jobs he hates? Survival, yes, but also and even more importantly, love to his family. Ultimately, love is an affection which causes joy and attachment. We need it, we crave it. It is goodness and we are inclined to feel it for everyone. The problem? Our society has turned this powerful, almost universal human love that everyone needs, into a selfish kind of love, the only accepted ‘love’ is love between couples.
Let me explain myself better, I’m not saying that having one partner is being selfish, it’s not, you can only love one heart at the time, they claim. What I mean is that humanity is more inclined to love each other, to share with each other, but it is more convenient to our economy for people to group in pairs and spend all their love tokens on each other. This is not exactly something we are naturally inclined to do. Our ancestors lived in communities where they shared; they shared time, resources and attention. Altruism is saintly, not as a coincidence, but because it’s loving. Our current focus on the couple as the centre of ‘life’ actually has some damaging consequences on us. For example, people who don’t have a partner feel less adequate and people who have one feel forced to stay in that relationship even though maybe their real interest is elsewhere. Neither of this people has something wrong with them and I’m sure, everyone has the same amount of ‘love’ to give. They are just doing what is ‘acceptable’.
I would like to point out the example of teachers; teachers educate and look after children that are not theirs, for the most part of the kid’s awake day. The children form an attachment, without asking question about ‘blood relations’ and so do the teachers, they begin to care. Could there be anything more natural than the human inclination to educate and look after the young? But no, love nowadays is equated with sex. The human you have sex with is the human you must love. And thus love turns into a cheesy, caricaturized, caramelised version of it. A pre-packed set of dresses, chocolate boxes, flowers and lube. Love is more than that. Love is caring, love is appreciating, not impressing, love is open, not jealous, love is universal, not only lustful. Love is life giver, not an accessory. Love is what prompts people to do things for others, not a certain partner you need to show off, to prove your value, like all the other items you need to literally hang on yourself nowadays to be somebody.
If love was the pink and red bubble portrayed mainly on television, if love was a quest that women needed to wear make-up to embark on and men needed to fill their wallets to join, love would not be that blanket under which some of the biggest craziest acts in history have been sheltered under. Love, raw, real human love to ourselves, to others, to nature, to animals, to knowledge, to art, to music, to sport, to hope, to life cannot be compared to the petty image of lust that romcoms sell us on a daily basis. Could we claim and re-brand the word love? Could we escape the set of ‘must-haves’ that are expected of each individual in Western society (must have a partner, must have an office job, must have a fiat, corsa, whatever, must have this month’s it colour, most have office party... you know the rest). Could we take the cheese out of the most powerful of human emotions and reclaim it as a basis for action? For growth instead of drama? Could we? Could we rid ourselves from the illusion and destroy the false idol that has been built instead of love? There is a little love heart sitting next to me on my desk, its reads ‘my hero’. I still want to claim, yes, we can reclaim love.
By Eliza Veretilo
