Before moving on from the topic of love, there is one more aspect that I need to address: love is asymmetrical. To really understand the significance of this feature, I will need to elaborate.
When I love my car, it may seem too obvious to comment that the car probably does not love me back. This is the simplest way to describe the asymmetry of love; the appreciation that exists on one side of the equation seldom matches the appreciation on the other side. I love my car. My car does not love me. However, this very simple and obvious discussion belays another detail that I have not really highlighted: is love something I have for someone/something else, or is it something shared between two entities? This question is a little harder to answer.
Try as I might, I am sure that in my previous blog posts I have introduced confusion by not being clear about where the love is. Most of the time, I have spoken of love as being the appreciation I have for another entity. Sometimes, I seem to have described it as being something shared between two entities. So which is it? For my purposes, I prefer to focus on the former, love being something I possess but not necessarily that the other entity has. The example above of the love of my car is a good example of this. The love that may exist between two human subjects seems like it isn’t the same at all.
However, the love between two comparable individuals is really just their respective love for each other. In the ideal, true love is often viewed as the mutual loves that the individuals have for each other. When subject A loves subject B, and subject B loves subject A, then I would like to say that they share a love. But just because they share a love doesn’t mean that the love that each has for the other is the same. In fact, it has been my experience that in any relationship between individuals, one always loves the other a bit more than the reverse. This observation often seems to lead to an imbalance of power between the individuals. For a long time, I held onto a quote that said “the one with the least interest in a relationship has the more control over that relationship.” This is an actual sociological idea, which you can read more about here.
Putting aside the discussion of power dynamics, this suggests that the love I have for another entity is not the same as the love the other entity has for me. Thinking on this, it makes a lot of sense. After all, I am a unique individual with my own personal history and my own genetics. It is unlikely my “situation” (as Simone de Beauvoir describes it) is going to be the same as any others’ “situation.” As such, my appreciation for others will be based on slightly different criteria, related to slightly different experiences, and even simply on differing genetic tastes. In this way, in the case of two entities loving each other, there will naturally be an asymmetry between those loves.
Ultimately, this suggests a mistake by people when they believe that love shared between two individuals is a single, monolithic construct. Furthermore, as each individual’s love for the other changes with time, the nature of their shared love too will change with time. If subject A loves subject B more than subject B loves subject A at a particular time, it is entirely possible that subject B will love subject A more at a later time. So not only is there a mistake in understanding love as a single monolithic construct shared between individuals due to the differences in those individuals, but the construct itself is fluid as each individual changes with time. Love, regardless of how you understand it, is far from static.
For all these reasons, I prefer not to discuss love as the shared thing between individuals, but instead as the appreciation of one individual for another entity. I think it further makes sense to think in these terms as love understood in this way can be built upon to describe the shared experience between individuals. It is much harder to coherently divide up a monolithic construct into smaller parts, especially when the understanding of the monolith is that it is a uniform, solid, atomic element.
Tying this all together with my previous posts, we find that love is a very personal experience. It is an expression of my freedom, a reflection of my personal history, and often times a subjugation to my genetics. This does not suggest that my love for others doesn’t affect their love for me. On the contrary, it is quite nice to be loved by others, and when others love me, I tend to reciprocate. This simple fact likely led to ideas such as the Golden Rule. However, it is important to recognize that the pleasure I experience at being loved leads to a reciprocity, and not the other way around. I do not reciprocate love before I am loved. I can love someone, expressing my appreciation for them, without the need for them to love me back. This again is the expression described by my love of my car.
Why is this all important? Why should my reader take all this seriously? Management of Expectations. All too often I have observed people with unreasonable expectations of their intimate partners and even of simple objects, such as cars. In the case of a car, it is fine to love a car, but one should always remember it is just a car. A car is an inanimate object, that is, it is a thing that cannot express a freedom or reciprocate love. It is good to respect your car, performing the regular maintenance and not driving it recklessly, because doing so will allow the car to exist much longer than if you did not do these things. But a car is just a car, and it can easily be replaced by another car.
Relationships with other people is exponentially more complicated. People are capable of expressing freedom and can reciprocate love. In fact, most people express freedom, even if it is just a little. The good slave who does his best to submit to the commands of his master will still express some freedom from time to time, even in the most basic decision making, trying to determine what he thinks will please his master. I do not think it is even possible for a human to not express freedom in their lives. The expression of an individual’s freedom is also what makes loving them challenging, as my appreciation for them can grow or wane based on their expressions of freedom.
To put this in another way, if my appreciation for another individual is based on their physical appearance, then my appreciation will change as their physical appearance changes. As they grow older, I may find them more attractive, or I may find them less attractive. In either case, my love for them, if it is based in eros like this, will not remain the same over time. Similarly if my appreciation is based on other aspects of their individuality. And as I suggested in a previous post that there is no static aspect of an individual, my appreciation will remain fluid regardless of what aspect I chose to base my appreciation on.
If I decide at the outset that love is a monolithic, unchanging, eternal, universal construct, then I will always be disappointed when I discover that it is not. If I expect that those that I love will love me in return in equal measure, I will be disappointed. If I make love out to be the most powerful force in the universe, able to break down barriers of time and space, I will live a life of misery as I am never able to attain such a love. I believe this is the sort of misery that many people experience, especially in their early adult lives, trying desperately to find fulfilling relationships with other people. Always looking for the Bigger Better Deal (BBD); always looking for the perfect relationship partner. The fact is, no such thing exists.
This may sound pretty bleak, but I assure you it isn’t. I found the “perfect” partner in my life, not because she is perfect in every way. She is “perfect” because I understand that she is a conscious entity that is capable of expressing a freedom, pursuing projects, and who cares about her world and those who inhabit it. She is “perfect” because I understand all of this, and I can express my love for her by helping her express her freedom, and I can provide support when she pursues projects. What makes her “perfect” has nothing to do with her physical appearance, nor does it have to do with her fondness for pineapples. She is “perfect” because I say she is, and it is my expression of my freedom to do so.