Love is...

Love is written about, sung about, drawn, painted, poeticized, and idealized.

Love is politicized, dragged through the gutter press, forced, given, and taken away.

Love is universal. Love is impossible to pin down.

Love is kinda weird.

Love is an enormous can of worms, and I have a can opener. I remember reading an interview with Colin Firth once where he talked about how love is a spectral concept; you could use the word ‘love’ to describe anything from your piece of pizza to your first-born child. For some reason that idea has stuck with me for years — probably because ‘love’, ‘pizza’, and ‘babies’ are easily grasped concepts — but also because it struck me at the time as something of a staggering truth. There are so many levels and varieties of love it’s almost overwhelming. Let’s make a list, shall we?

• Metaphorical love — the kind you have for food, media, and products. (“I love sushi!”, “I love that new album by Alison Krauss/The Golden Girls/Umberto Eco novels/the collection at Sir John Soane’s museum in London!”, “I love that new line of nail polish Fergie just released!”)
• Familial love — please tell me I don’t need to spell this one out…
• 'Biblical’, ‘carnal’, or… I don’t know, ‘passionate’ love — the kind you have for your romantic interests.
• That ‘in love’ kind of love, which works in tandem to the variety outlined above.
• What I’m going to call ‘friendly love’, for lack of a better term — the kind of love you have for the people in your life who don’t classify as family or your partner(s). (Some people have more than one. I don’t judge. You do you.)
• That sort of general love you have in varying degrees for anyone you are acquainted with who doesn’t fit into any of the above categories.
• Basic human love — the kind you have for people in general unless you’re some kind of monster, you asshole.
• That special love reserved for non-human beings like your pets.

These are just my personal categories*. I think everyone has their own, really, and the lines between them aren’t necessarily as clear as I’ve made them out to be above. It’s a spectrum, remember? One can bleed into another into another at any time for any reason. Love is unique to every individual insofar as expression, depth of feeling, and categorization. Famous portrayals of love run the gamut from the clichéd — “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” — to the poetic:

“...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...”

First of all, always say you’re sorry. Don’t be a dick. Second, my old pal Billy Shakes had a turn of phrase that could make necrophilia seem beautiful, so take him with a grain of salt, too.

If you haven’t cottoned on just yet, I’ve been thinking a lot about love recently. Love has inspired wars, pushed people to acts of desperation, and created unbridgeable divides. On the flip side, love has inspired peace, pushed people to acts of compassion, and mended rifts no one thought could be healed.

Each of us has a different relationship with love. Maybe you’re in one of the three bears’ boats: “This love is too much! It’s smothering me!” “This love is like trying to squeeze blood from a stone.” “This love is juuuuuuuuuuuust right!” In a perfect world, everyone would be in that ‘just right’ place, but the world isn’t perfect. Human beings aren’t perfect. Love isn’t perfect. We might love someone who doesn’t love us back, or the other way around. Someone might think that they are loving us by behaving in a certain way towards us, when in fact they’re doing more harm than good. Love can be the veil over a completely different desire — say, you think you’re in love with someone, but one day you wake up and realize that you’re really just trying to make them fit a space in your life that can’t actually be filled; it’s kind of a ‘square peg, round hole’ thing. Two people can love each other and be completely unable to stand each other at the same time.

I wonder, in our vastly different levels and definitions of love, if it all gets so muddied up that we can’t work out which end is up? Or maybe it’s how we have experienced love throughout our lives which shapes how we love and allow ourselves to be loved? Some people love one-sided — they either exclusively give love, or exclusively take it. The first is unhealthy, the second is the sign of a narcissist. Some people hit the love-jackpot and have a knack for giving and receiving in a thoroughly wholesome way, and the rest of us stand back and watch jealously.

And don’t even get me started on the media construct of ‘love’, which isn’t love at all, it’s hogwash and it exists purely to make us all feel inadequate.

The problem is, life is certainly less fulfilling without at least a modicum of some description of love…and I don’t think that loving your piece of pizza really counts.

As for me — most days anyway — love is like Communism; it only works in theory.



*Apparently the Greeks had a very similar list: https://lonerwolf.com/different-types-of-love/ Either I knew about it and repressed it, or I’m psychic now so ew stop thinking about that! Gross!