do you like them or are you meant to like them, edit: I still don’t know how to l-
I’ve been thinking about love a lot, and in the first few pages of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving (which has issues), I’ve been instructed, told, that society’s idea of love rests a lot on conventional sex appeal.
What is lust? We love to say love is blind but what if things that aren’t love masquerade as it, blinding us in masks as we dance around in a little charade?
Love and lust are inextricable, it’s romantic I think. But they’re also different. So what am I doing apart from saying things, guessing things, not knowing anything? Maybe nothing.
I think the Tolstoy idea, ‘all happy families are alike’, is true for love, even though it looks and feels different with everyone you meet? I will never really let myself understand (buy into) people’s thinking that ‘everyone is replaceable’ because they’re not? And maybe I’m silly to argue the difference between finding someone good or better than but still different, and say that, you can fill the hole but that’s not replacement. Because replacing is boring. Or maybe I care too much about the details.
Maybe love is more a measure made by society and fitted by us, and by someone else, than an unshaded mould that is really ‘made’ for us. Maybe fulfilling societal holes is more important.
But most of all I guess love is an attachment, among many things. A kind of investment or need to care about how someone is, a kind of spreading of your problems to multiply and divide with another and lay on a bridge.
I ramble. The main things the book said, bearing in mind I’ve read about ten pages, and have the terrible affliction of reading, reading only bits of philosophy/non-fiction books to glean a meaning I settle with contentedly, sufficiently enough to be pleased with my new state of enlightened igorance, and the book’s place on my shelf as a dust collector
- Our idea of love is too tied to society’s expectation of what a lover should look like, of the somewhat quantitative value a person occupies, in the step ladder, the whole idea of ‘leagues’ and relative conventional attractiveness kind of fucks us up, this is our human conditioning, society’s oil, and to live, is to exist in this sphere that animals probably feel about differently, or not, because we humans have made our own new system of hierarchy, a glossed over survival of the fittest book
- Love is an art, and an art that is not pursued so much as we like to pose to be drawn, painted, and written about in poems. We invest too much of ourselves in posing, in reaching up, for the next attainable way we can be more attractive, and we care too much about being loved, because that’s human vulnerability, owe yourself, defend yourself. We are told it is so easy to love, and ‘there is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly’
- We place too much emphasis on the falling phase, and mistake that for standing in love, and I guess that’s society’s fault, because what film would be successful if it wasn’t about a fall? I guess falling in love isn’t an accomplishment. It is our greatest weakness, because it is our fall, to love because we get it so wrong. We don’t say rising into love. The word fall itself shows weakness, maybe, to another person, letting them carve a little hole in us. In fact, the word falling into kind of says everything it is, it’s approaching this climax but it isn’t really love, love as some constant force. But nobody cares about standing, because that’s boring. No one ends up in hospital standing up all day. As a society we romanticise falling in love to death, and instead of lasting depth, we get excited over rushing, chemicals racing ahead of ourselves only to run out of breath, look around, and have fallen out of the well we never looked into properly, wasting wishes on something that maybe could never have been. I think we don’t understand depth, and that sparks can condense into something less wavering, something more solid, and intense, but in a different sense, but instability is more exciting in the way our thrills in life are, temporary
