Common Sense and Common Virtue

Let me not to the marriage of true minds 

Admit impediments.

Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool,

though rosy lips and cheeks 

Within his bending sickle’s compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

–William Shakespeare

“Love is a temporary madness.  It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides.  And when it subsides you have to make a decision.  You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.  Because this is what love is.  Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of eternal passion.  That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are.  Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and it is both an art and a fortunate accident.  Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches, we found that we were one tree, and not two.” –From Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

“Love, then, is a form of work or a form of courage.  Specifically, it is work or courage directed toward the nurture of our own or another’s spiritual [not in a religious sense] growth, and for this reason all work and all courage is not love.  But since it requires the extension of ourselves, love is always either courage or work.  If an act is not of work or courage, then it is not an act of love.  There are no exceptions.  The principal form that the work of love takes is attention.  When we love another we give him or her our attention; we attend to that person’s growth.  When we love ourselves we attend to our own growth.  When we attend to someone we are caring for that person.  The act of attending requires that we make the effort to set aside our existing preoccupations (as was described in regard to the discipline of bracketing) and actively shift our consciousness.  Attention is an act of will, of work against the inertia of our own minds.” - M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Many factors have led to the selection of today’s topic.  We have just finished the Easter season, yesterday was Mother’s Day, and like many people, I have been reflecting on how thankful I am for having love in my life, and how I can actively be better at loving.  So here are some thoughts I have had of late on the age-old mystery of love.

I have quoted these three rather lengthy passages, one poetry, one fictional prose, and one clinical prose because I think in our day and age, we have been, as the old song says “looking for love in all the wrong places.”  In the case of many married people, or others in long-term relationships that have become stale, people being to look outward for love, when they should be looking at the person sleeping next to them.  As the Mandolin quote so aptly points out, love is not a gushy feeling–that is being in love, and it is always temporary.  What none of these quotes fully points out, however, is that “being in love” is an inherently selfish act, though I do not advocate attaching a negative connotation to this statement.  It is selfish, not because it is arrogant or egotistical (though it can be those things), it is selfish because it is primarily about what one receives from, rather than what one gives to the “in love” relationship.

Without question, being in love is exhilarating.  It is the province of romance, excitement.  Everybody, male and female, craves this form of excitement.  And, I would argue, nobody should go through life without having ever fallen in love.  It is a formative experience.  For those who are conscious about their own human spirit, they can learn much about themselves throughout the stages of being in love.  But that feeling, that excitement, indeed, being in love, is not an end of its own.  It cannot be, for things would end rather quickly.  Rather, it must be the introduction to the more noble, and less romantic, views of love expressed in the three quotations above.  Shakespeare was certainly himself a romantic in many ways, yet he so keenly observes that real love does not alter with the passage of time.  If there is to be alteration, it is the alteration of growth.  Since real love is volitional, and not emotional, it cannot help but grow, and it will endure all of the stages of community, including chaos and emptiness.  

Few people have ever experienced truly unconditional love, and few people are truly available to give it.  It is something that we must all aspire to, however, even when our own wants and needs may seem so important.  It requires, as Peck notes, constant attention.  

I must admit that I can be one of the world’s worst listeners.  If I am preoccupied with emails or other things on my computer screen, I can so easily tune out the person sitting or standing right next to me.  This is my failure in my discipline to do what psychologists call bracketing, which is breaking completely away from what one is doing and paying full attention to the person right in front of you.  In the modern context, this means not answering the cell phone when it rings, or looking at the text message when the phone beeps, or responding to that last instant message before feigning listening.  It is perhaps my greatest failing as a relationship partner, and one that I am far too keenly aware of as I have been engaging in significant self-examination of late.  It is painful to engage in this sort of self-examination because it means admitting to one’s own flaws, and that is not something that comes easily to any human being, least of all me.

Although the excitement of a new romance eventually always fades, this is not license for people to be lazy about it either.  Romance can be maintained, though necessarily less intensely, through volition and constant attention.  I will step out on a limb and stake new definitional grounds with respect to the term.  Romance, in my view, is the excited feeling of being wanted by somebody more than anything else that person wants.  This is why romance is virtually always sexual in nature, and why sexual relationships often precede the true work of love in the sense that Peck describes.  Sex and romance, then, are not to be tossed aside, but they are only two means of expression of love.  Sex and intimacy are both on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and it would seem that in order for somebody to grow spiritually, they must have their needs met.  Consequently, although I think Peck is correct elsewhere in his writing on love, that “being in love” is something of a misnomer and a myth, I think that attending to one’s partners needs can include (but is certainly far from limited to) the need for sex and romance.

My definition of romance, then, opens us to explore a new understanding of the place of romance in a long-term relationship.  The first spark of romance, which can last for days, weeks, and even months, though rarely much longer than that in my observation, is quite intense–it is truly the wanting of a person or thing more than one wants anything or anybody else.  Two things can then happen: people can get into a long-term relationship or they just have a fling.  For those who decided to establish some sort of a long-term relationship, if it happens before the initial romantic spark fades, a certain reality will set in, namely that they have in a sense now achieved getting that person who they wanted more than anybody or anything else in the world.  People frequently use the phrase “well we always want what we can’t have.”  This is not profound; it is a truism.  By definition, we cannot want things that we have.

One definition of the word “want” provided to us by the dictionary, I think illustrates my point: “to be deficient in some part or thing, or to feel or have a need.”  Consequently, once we have gained something or achieved it, it is not that we “don’t want it anymore” but rather that we are not in want of it anymore.  So we turn to wanting other things we do not have.  This is a perfectly human and natural pattern of behavior.  Perhaps we feel we are deficient in friends, so we seek to acquire, we want, new friends.  Or perhaps we have certain material desires that we feel we are deficient in, so we turn to those pursuits.  What happens frequently, then, is we seek romance (that is, the wanting of something or someone more than we want anything else) in places other than in our beloved.  We do not realize this is what we are doing, but this is precisely what happens.  And so, our beloved can sometimes feel betrayed or neglected by this romancing of other things or other people.  

In a sense, this is evidence of the human propensity toward examining situations in terms of zero sum games and false dichotomies.  ”Either me or that,” or “If something else is gaining my beloved’s attention, it means I am losing.”  We must both recognize in ourselves when we let our romancing of other things go too far to where we really are neglecting our beloved, but we must simultaneously give significant leeway to our beloved when we find them romancing other things and other people (within reasonable limits, obviously.  infidelity, whether physical or emotional is innately destructive to all relationships, both long-term marriage-like relationships as well as friendships, business partnerships, and familial relationships.  Because of the scope of relationships I claim are affected by infidelity, I obviously mean infidelity to be more than merely the act of having sex with somebody other than one’s beloved.  Infidelity is simply a synonym for “unfaithfulness,” and one can be unfaithful to a business partner by betraying that person, or by materially breaching their commitment.  Familial relationships can suffer infidelity by abandonment, neglect, or severe judgmentalism.  Marital and marriage-like relationships can be wrecked by multiple forms of infidelity, including obviously sexual promiscuity, deceptive or lying behavior, other breaches of trust, or neglect.)

Yet insofar as the romancing of other things (since we have already concluded that romance itself is always temporary) does not lead in some way to any form of infidelity, it must be allowed or else the relationship will become suffocating.  Maslow’s hierarchy of needs should be viewed not as a two-dimensional triangle, but a three-dimensional pyramid.  When we find deficiencies in the meeting of our needs, we naturally set out to eliminate those deficiencies.  When one particular deficiency becomes defining and controlling, we generally set out to “romance” that thing that we are missing that is defining or controlling.  This is precisely why most romances are in the form of erotic relationships.  For most people, this is an all-or-none thing.  Either they are in a relationship or they are not.  And although many people have just given up on wanting the fulfillment that comes from a relationship, for those who have not given up on that want, it is usually defining for them, and that is why it generally leads them to romance.  

But romance can be for other things that people are deficient in.  Many a political figure has had a life-long romance with power.  Napoleon’s love for Josephine was always secondary to his quest for power and domination.  Caesar’s love of power always eclipsed everything else.  This is why many political figures find themselves in promiscuous and infidelitous sexual relationships so often–sexual conquests and “getting away with something” are both expressions of power.  Many businessmen make the same mistake in the pursuit of money and financial success and reputation as politicians make with the pursuit of power.  This is why I must make so clear that romancing other things must have its limitations, or else it can be all-consuming and thus lead to divergent forms of infidelity.  The scientist can commit infidelity by being too much in love with his research–to the neglect of his spouse.  The physician can commit infidelity by being too much in with his obsession to fix and heal (as seemingly good as it appears).  The writer can be too much in love with his words. The philosopher can be too much in love with his own thoughts–an act I will readily admit I’m frequently guilty of.  In the same way that we can commit idolatry by worshipping countless things we find out in the world, we can also commit infidelity to our beloved by romancing the various things we find in the world.  Frequently these two acts are committed simultaneously.

This is no accident.  From the context of the Christian perspective, we will recall that Christ issued two commandments “Love the Lord your God, and the second is like it: Love thy neighbor as thyself.”  Christ later even goes farther with respect to the second commandment, amending it to say “Love one another even as I have loved you,” which in the lens of history, means loving others even unto the point of death.  In many ways, I think if we combine these two and rephrase slightly we can truly understand how idolatry and infidelity almost necessarily coincide:

“The two most important commandments are thus: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and all your soul, and you cannot even begin to do this until you have loved your neighbor even as Christ loved you and gave himself unto death for your sake.”  

If we follow this, I think we will find that fidelity to our beloved comes not only naturally, but necessarily.  It is no wonder then that Paul describes the fruit of the spirit of God as “first love, then peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”  His phrase there, “the fruit of the spirit,” I do not think has any metaphysical, higher order meaning.  I think he is simply saying that people who display these things are in some sense exemplifying the essence of divinity.  I think this is quite possible for anybody, regardless of their religious declarations.  Divinity is not the narrow province of Christian theology (though I think it is the most perfect expression of it), and I have seen many a divine person exemplify the fruit of the spirit of God in their lives who wasn’t a churchgoing man, or even a professing Christian.  

All of this being said, I think it is also important to note that there is no perfect person, and consequently, no perfect mate.  We are all profoundly flawed, and none of us is immune.  I know some people who want to marry the perfect person.  They are all single.  They aren’t even dating.  This is where Peck can also be insightful.  The above quotation from Peck about love as an act of will also alludes to a position he explores more fully later on in the same chapter, and that is love as an act of courage.  Love, as he points out, requires us to step outside of our normal ways of doing things and our normal ways of living.  We must bracket and listen.  We must stop what we are doing and pay attention.  We must look for ways to attend to our beloved’s needs and growth, and we must do all of these things unselfishly and unconditionally.  And at the same time, we are risking that the other person may or may not return this unselfish and unconditional love.  It is a tremendous risk.  Anybody who has ever attempted a long-term relationship has surely experienced this at least once–the feeling of going far beyond what seems reasonable and taking a chance on a flawed human being to provide an unselfish love that is directly contrary to our human nature.  This is a risk of extraordinary proportions, and yet it is a risk that all people who truly want happiness must take in some way or another.

In the face of risk, there is one hedge against total loss, and that is a concept that is quite rare in practice in modern America, and that concept is commitment.  When two people commit themselves to one another, to love each other unconditionally, they enter not into a contract, but into a covenant.  A contract is simply an agreement made between two parties that each side will do something in exchange for the other side’s doing of something else.  These contracts almost always specify particular remedies for when one side breaches the agreement.  Most people in business go into contractual arrangements with the understanding that there is a high probability of the contract being broken at one point or another, but they are ok with it, because there is a remedy.  Thusly, in the contractual world, people always operate at the margin: so when the marginal benefit of keeping the contract becomes outweighed by the marginal cost of not keeping it, people choose to break the contract.  Covenants are not so.  Genuine covenants do not contemplate their dissolution or non-performance, rather they presuppose in their very nature full and perpetual performance.  Covenants, then, are the highest form of pact between two people, or between groups of people.  Covenants free us to take greater risks.  But we should never enter into covenants unless we mean to keep them.  

The beauty of a covenant of love is that both sides have committed to one another that they will not breach the terms of the covenant under any condition, even if the other side is in breach.  Consequently, the covenant requires two people to work out their differences in order to achieve the purpose of the agreement, which in this context is the achievement of the kind of volitional love described in the three opening quotations.  Without commitment, then, there can be no true love.  The marital vows in traditional Christian wedding ceremonies begin with an introduction that marriage is an honorable estate and one that is not to be entered into lightly.  So few people enter into any sort of loving relationship these days with anything but levity, because most of the times, they enter into those relationships while still “in love.”  There is more pain found in empty promises and false expectations than anything else in life.  Even in death, there is mostly solace, but in broken relationships, there is mostly despair.  

We must then all commit ourselves to high standards for all of our human relationships, not just romantic/domestic ones.  This high standard means keeping our commitments, communicating honestly, listening attentively, focusing on the needs of the Thou in the relationship rather than the I.  It is so simple conceptually, but so difficult in execution.  One of the first ways we can reach this level of commitment is to toss out expectations for what we are going to get out of it, and rather look upon the situation somewhat objectively, determine if the person who is the object of our affection has the “right stuff” (for lack of a better term) to engage in this sort of mature, growth-oriented relationship.  The main element to look for in answering this question is commitment and seriousness of purpose, not with respect to the outcome, but instead with respect to the process.  Men, I think, are especially goal-oriented, outcome-focused beings, and are so prone to achieving certain goals, rather than striving constantly to achieve harmony and unity of action in the process.  

Unlike projects, relationships are not meant to have a culmination or an end.  Relationships all end, either through death or sin (and I do not use the word “sin” in necessarily religious or Christian terms here, but rather as an act of emotional/spiritual/physical/psychological violence against another person), but that is not their “destined end or way,” to use Longfellow’s words.  Therefore, if relationships do not have a finite goal or end, they must be about the process–how things go from morning ’til evening each day, day in and day out.  Because life can be monotonous, extreme love must manifest itself in the extreme action of making the monotony of life bearable and in the best of cases, even interesting and exciting.  Every day will not be interesting and exciting, and some days may not even be bearable, but in the long-run, there is so much intrinsic value to the kind of love I have been describing in this essay that adult human persons who want the fullest out of life would do themselves (and others around them) a great disservice by not actively pursuing this way of living and sharing it with another person.  

May we all then contemplate these difficult things, wrap our hearts around them, and try to live lives of love, unconditional and unselfish.