LOVE: A COLLECTION OF EMOTIONS

I have been asked on several occasions to give a definition for love and, although I had previously written about the different types of love we experience in our lives, I feel the need to go specific and deal with love as the main object of my research.

To the question “What is love?” I had always answered “I don’t know”, but today I want to give an answer because I’ve had a sort of revelation, after nights spent in lonely thoughts and self-questioning. So here goes my answer.

Love is not a/one feeling: it’s not bi-dimensional and it can’t be reduced to a shape with an area and a perimeter. It has a depth and it has a volume. In geometry it would be a solid figure, certainly not a plain one. We’d need more than a base and a height to calculate the entire surface it occupies. We would even have to integrate, as to simplify the operation, because just because I said it’s a solid doesn’t make it a regular one. And this is just in geometry.

In Art, love is just like the colour white. In our everyday life we are used to identifying this state of mind with the colour red, because that’s how it has been universally represented since the beginning of time. Red, being a hot colour, reminds us of the warmth we experience when we feel love, but that’s just about the sensation. If we are to search for an ontological analogy, then the colour white will be more appropriate. White is known as the sum of all colours and that has been revealed through a very simple physical experiment called diffraction. If you place a white laser in front of a glass, the light passes through the glass and diffracts in all possible colours. So even love can be diffracted into various feelings; reason why I chose the analogy between the colour white and love.

Fact is should love be a unique feeling, it would continuously disappear or be over shadowed whenever another one takes over. But on the contrary, single feelings and sensations become the means through which we express our love for someone.

Having explained this, I want to go on and say that since what we feel and how we react and act are peculiar to the individual and their character and personality, the totality of their feelings, actions, reactions and character/personality also becomes peculiar, thus making love something that can never be the same in two different people. It’s just like a fingerprint: nobody’s fingerprints are the same with someone else’s, so nobody loves the same way as another person. And this leads us to the subsequent point.

Love shouldn’t be measured by quantity, but by quality. For it to be measured by quantity, we’d need to have that feeling expressed in the same identical manner by identical people, talking about their inner entities. But we’ve already said that nobody is the same as another person, so that discards the possibility of quantifying love. Being that love depends on the quality of a person, we can only talk about the way someone loves and not about how much they love.

The way people love is strictly, but not exclusively, related to the way they express or don’t express these feelings. When there is a lack of expression, we can hazard a term like repression to define this type of situation. It’s common belief that love should be expressed and not suppressed. But even when there is an expression, some would still argue that there is a right way to do it, while there are many wrong ways to do it.

Right or wrong when it comes to how love should be expressed is not something to be dealt with in a scientific manner. It’s a matter of moral, of individual preference. We should first of all see what people’s idea of hedonism is, before we can say “this is the perfect way to express love in relation to that person”. It’s very subjective.

It’s part of our nature as humans to continually compare ourselves to other people and more often than we should, we conceitedly conclude that ours is the best way. But the word is various and so are people. Some people believe love has to be painful, whether it’s being given or it’s being received. Others choose sacrifice as the best way to show how much they care about someone.

In the case where there is a lack of expression as in people just not doing anything to show their feelings, so many things can be said in regards. I’d like to hazard a couple of theories to explain this “weird” situation. Unemotional people are not really well seen by their neighbours.

The first explanation is a very high IQ (intelligence quotient). People with a highly developed intellect are more attracted to logic and scientific analysis and they consider emotions uninteresting and devoid of comprehension. In this case there is a refusal to go emotional because it’s more like a lose-lose situation.

The second explanation is a very low IQ. A low IQ excludes the possibility to understand basic human interactions. There is no choice or refusal to be emotional for the simple reason that they don’t even know what emotions are.

The third explanation is mental illness. Sociopaths and psychopaths have their own definition of hedonism, emotions and human interactions. I’m not a specialist, so I won’t indulge further with this.

Among the three scenarios listed above, the first and the second are more frequent, with the first one arousing more curiosity, because people are generally attracted to very intelligent people.

So let’s summarize what we’ve said so far.

-          Love is a collection of emotions

-          Love is a peculiar feeling

-          Love is meant to be qualified and not quantified

-          Love can be expressed or suppressed

-          Love is expressed in very peculiar and distinct ways

-          Love and its expression are in strict relation with our IQ.

This last point opens a door for another topic. How much does our IQ matter in matters of the heart? Does EQ (emotional quotient) really exist? Can they co-exist?

Stay tuned!