Love – Quick analysis
Updated 2019/04
Romantic love is temporary sexual chemistry, nothing else. Even dictionaries say this, it’s not like I’m making this up.[1] Then, spending a lot of time together, you also become good friends, and that’s the bond that lasts over the years, also thanks to the memory of past sexual harmony; when you’re old, sex ends, but you still have friendship, when it holds up – otherwise animosity ends everything, including, when you’re young, sexual chemistry.
Now, let’s examine, though, all the other uses of the word “love”.
Passion, well, that’s quite an easy case because it’s exclusively sexual frenzy and craving in quite an obvious way.
The idea of love as it is portrayed in movies, which lasts a long time despite being based (unbeknownst to the involved parts) solely on sexual chemistry, is an illusory concept induced by education. Just look at the tribes isolated from society that have survived to this day. Those just need to eat and reproduce, and to stay in company with all the individuals of the group, and they are content. A few rituals, and that’s it. Once that is guaranteed, you can forget the name of the chick that you got pregnant. Education, on the other hand, in the complex plot of the collective illusion of this sick society, tells you about this type of love. Which can be said to exist too, but precisely as a temporary shared illusion. When it fades, it also has an adverse effect: not because you are saddened by what you no longer have – not a big deal, you’ll get to live other experiences… But rather, once that which is in fact an illusion has fallen, you will suddenly find yourself thrown into reality, and you will become more self-aware; for a few days, you become almost schizoid. You’ll experience the nature of the human condition directly, and for someone who even has cheerful personality, already deluded by social inventions, and maybe even immersed in the illusion of movie-like temporary events, that’s quite a beating. Then immediately you find some distraction (i.e. illusion, again) to try to forget what you saw with your ignorant and innocent eyes and, if you don’t learn from your mistake, you are even going to fall for it again.
Then there is unconditional love – which only exists in blood ties, there’s compassion (of religious nature too), that reflection we have when we see our fellow men struggling; then there’s affection; but all these terms, often interchangeable, concern something entirely different because sexual chemistry is missing; and, lacking that, the connection is much weaker: the religious man, in front of his ideal woman, forgets about his god; the compassion for the fat girl is less strong than the one for the fit girl (terrible or unfair, that’s how it works); the father’s unconditional love for his criminal son is no longer so unconditional; unlike the woman’s love for her criminal partner who, by screwing her hard and good, makes her turn a blind eye (or two) to his illegal side (assuming other suitors have an equal economic situation). Or what about another woman who cheats on her unattractive partner with another, more attractive, one, unless the friendship with the lifelong companion lasted so long that it would be a pity to do so: “a pity”!, that is, there is not an incorruptible movie-like love (the “soulmate”, a nonsense concept), rather (and merely), it would be a shame to lose that friendship.
Then, and it mostly occurs in adolescence and unrequited love (or in limerence in general), there’s the transcendental love, this unexplainable feeling that you don’t know where it comes from, like something that seems to surpass any other feeling. It is nothing but the mal de vivre, which is mistaken for something else and channeled onto a single individual due to the well-known adolescent phenomenon of the oneitis; how could he imagine that he’s feeling the “malaise” of life «I, I who am a happy and perky type! It must be love!» And if it is reciprocated, then any chance of understanding is lost, because sex enters the game.
It all works like this due to mere biological reasons, since the only engine of human motion is the drive to reproduce. Today, man, to escape the infernal curse that comes from the drive to conceive, uses a condom, it’s not like he abstains from fucking, because the drive is too strong and the biological engine is the same, so these are the resulting dynamics.
The woman, on the other hand, really has the drive to actually conceive (sex is just the means to), and therefore she often dupes the (gaga) man to do what the species commands her, but that is another topic.
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Of course, all this is not said lightly and serenely, much less with the sneer of the party pooper: it’s a tragedy, it really is. Because in the life of the modern man, afflicted by the curse of reason and metacognition, and who lives and breaths capitalism and nihilism, love is very often entrusted with the task of being the last and only true lifeline.
1. Looking at the etymology, instead:
- love: lobha, ”desire, greed”
etimo.it:
amore: lat. amorem from amare similar to gr. mào I wish, as it literally indicates more the effect of the natural inclination and passion aroused by the attractions of the external form than the result of choice and reflection – Perhaps for this reason the ancients made love a god, which they represented in the form of a blindfolded boy and said born of Venus, goddess of beauty.
amare: to desire: with this word the Latins meant an almost involuntary zeal, an almost unthought vehemence and ardor of passion, a feeling more animalistic than human, whereas to mark the difference between the love of instinct and that of reason they had the word diligere (ca. to favor), which has in itself the same elements and the same prudence as eleggere (to elect).