The Nature of Love

I walked into this class at the beginning of the term with the firm belief that love is a feeling we cannot control. Since reading the works of bell hooks and Max Scheler, however, I can’t help but alter that opinion. Whether you are the one being betrayed, or the one betraying your loved one, the betrayal of love causes some of the deepest emotional pain know to humans. I have had the experience of both betraying and being betrayed by a loved one; both we just as painful. If love is an act, we are responsible for our actions and they cannot be excused by anything. To betray a loved one is to deliberately cause them pain, which can be just as painful to a person as being betrayed. If love were a feeling, then we wouldn’t feel such guilt, such pain, when we betrayed a loved one. If love were a feeling, then we wouldn’t feel so miserable when being betrayed by a loved one. But because love is an act, a choice, the betrayal of love causes some of the deepest emotional pain known to humans.

Both hooks and Scheler view love as an act, though they understand love as an act differently. Hooks found her definition of love in a self-help book and quotes M. Scott Pecks’ definition that love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” (hooks 4). Love is an act; it’s an action that we have to take responsibility for. Loving someone means that one does not cause deliberate harm to the other. Hooks is very firm with the idea that love and abuse cannot mix. “When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive,” (hooks 6). She says it is possible to care for someone and still abuse them, as she experienced in her childhood, but caring is only one ingredient to love and cannot alone be the basis for love. “To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients––care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication,” (hooks 5). I agree that love requires more than just care, or just affection, or just respect. Any one of these characteristics can be the foundation to a friendship, but love requires many things combined. Furthermore, love requires an act of willingness to want it. Not all of us automatically care for someone, or trust them, or respect them because of a feeling. It takes work to reach that point where we can be open and be in a loving relationship.

Hooks believes true love is when one is able to let their true self come out. The true self, as she explains, is the self that is creative and real, the core personality of a person. It is who we are when we are most comfortable. The false self, on the other hand, is the self we present to others when we are not comfortable enough to show who we really are. This is not a bad thing, hooks says, and everyone needs a false self. The false self is generally the self people present as a first impression, a self to hide behind until we know that we can trust other people to see our true self. We use this false self to present ourselves in a way that lives up to social expectations. True love is when the false self is not needed when in the presence of a loved one. “The essence of true love is mutual recognition––two individuals seeing each other as they really are,” (hooks 183). This type of love is what most people are looking for. However, they fail to realize that this level of love requires work.

Love is also a risk. To love someone is to put yourself out there, to put yourself in the most vulnerable position. “Embarking on such a relationship is frightening precisely because we feel there is no place to hide,” (hooks 184). Hooks claims that many people aren’t willing to accept love as an act because it requires too much of a risk. “Many of us choose relationships of affection and care that will never become loving because they feel safer. The demands are not as intense as loving requires,” (hooks 10). Many people will believe they are in love with a person simply because the person is there, not because they are actually in love.

Scheler views love as an act that is the source of feeling. Love increases the higher values we see in people. A person in love could list the reasons why they are in love with a particular person, but it is not those reasons, those values they see in the other person, that is the source of their love; their love for the other is the source of their higher values. The same values in another person would not mean the same. This is what Scheler meant when he wrote that “in love (and hatred) between human beings these acts remain wholly independent of changes in the state of feeling, as is shown by the fact that throughout such changes they remain fixed upon their objects, as with a steady, unwavering light,” (Scheler 147). One in love does not have the desire to change their loved one, but their opinion of values in another person change so as to include the values their loved one has. “Love... looks to the establishment of higher possibilities of value..., and to the maintenance of these,” while also “seeking to remove the possibility of lower value,” (Scheler 153). In this way, Scheler’s idea of love agrees with hooks definition of nurturing one’s spiritual growth; it isn’t about changing the other person, it’s about helping them to grow according to who they already are.

Adultery is among the worst betrayals one can commit. Stepping outside the relationship between two people to include a third person is harmful if all parties haven’t consented. 91% of our class agree that adultery is never OK and most of the class believes that consent is the dividing line between adultery and polygamy. Being pressured into polygamy, either as a relationship or a one-time sexual experience, is also a terrible betrayal. I have a friend who experience this particular type of betrayal. My friend, “Jane”, was dating a man named “Jack”. Jack wanted to have a three-way between Jane and her friend “Joan”. Jane felt put off by the idea, but Jack would not give up on his request. Jane eventually gave in and her, Jack and Joan ended up having sex. Jack, as it turns out, was just looking for an excuse to have sex with another woman. When Jane actually witnessed her boyfriend having sex with her best friend she asked Jack to stop, but he didn’t. The betrayal Jane felt led to many fights between her and Jack and almost led to the end of their relationship.

Bonnie Steinbock sees love as a promise between two people that creates a trusting environment. She states that “sex is by its nature intimate, involving both physical and psychological exposure. This both requires and creates trust, which is closely allied to feelings of affection and love,” (Steinbock 738). To this hooks would say that trust and affection are only two feelings needed for the act of love. To love someone is to trust them. Since love is a conscious act, trusting someone is also a conscious act. As hooks says, true love is allowing your true self be exposed. To have sex with the person you love is an intimate experience which involves both physical and psychological exposure. Bringing a third person into that sexual experience with you and a loved one is exposing your loved one’s true self in a way they may not want exposed. You are breaking the trust they have for you by making what should be an intimate experience somewhat public. My friend Jane trusted Jack. When she realized he just wanted to have sex with another woman her trust for him was broken.

Adultery, according to Steinbock, involves two moral failures: promise breaking and deception. “Having an affair (as opposed to a roll in the hay) requires time and concentration; it will almost inevitably mean neglecting one’s spouse, one’s children, one’s work. More important, however, exclusivity seems to be an intrinsic part of ‘true love,’ ” (Steinbock 738). John McMurtry, on the other hand, doesn’t think love has to be exclusive. He believes the government’s restrictions on marriage are limiting people’s freedom of relationships. He believes that the “restrictions of our form of monogamous marriage together constitute a state-regulated, indefinite, and exclusive ownership by two individuals of one another’s sexual powers,” (McMurtry 715). While I do agree that people tend to have a sense of ‘ownership’ of their partner, I don’t agree that polygamous relationships would be better than monogamous relationships. Bringing more than two people into a relationship violates the trust built between them. Should one person have complete control over another’s sexual activities? No. But if two people are in a loving sexual relationship than they should at least have a say in what the other does on a sexual level since they will, one way or another, be affected.

Jane’s relationship with Jack did eventually come to an end, not because of the situation involving Joan, but because Jane had fallen in love with Jack’s false self, which, as hooks would argue, is not true love. She had such high values of his false self that when she learned who his true self was (an emotionally abusive man) she didn’t want to believe it and clung to an idea of who he was when they first started dating. I remember her telling me many times that she would rather be with him than be alone. Jane was acting as many people would. “We fear that evaluating our needs and then carefully choosing partners will reveal that there is no one for us to love. Most of us prefer to have a partner who is lacking than no partner at all,” (hooks 173).

Love is an act that we have free choice over. Many people want to think that love is a feeling because they don’t want to believe they choose someone who hurt them. “We are often taught we have no control over our ‘feelings.’ Yet most of us accept that we choose our actions, that intention and will inform what we do. We also accept that our actions have consequences,” (hooks 13). Knowing that love is an act and we choose who we love, betrayal from that person is so much worse because we chose them, and they chose to betray us.