Funny thing called Love~II
Source: Abhik Roy: The Statesman
There is a widespread feeling among today’s youth, especially in the West, that real love can’t be found. This is why young men and women these days are opting for what is known in the West as “hooking up.” The younger generation is fearful of the pain and sorrow that a failed relationship could bring. So, they form relationships purely for sexual pleasure without any kind of emotional investment. In all you’ve ever wanted Isn’t Enough, Harold Kushner tells us that the young generation is so “fearful of the pain and disappointment that they will forgo the possibilities of love and joy.”
According to Thomas Merton, the climate of cynicism and hopelessness has created a “package” concept of love in Western societies where love is regarded as a business deal. The concept of “deal” assumes that we all have needs that have to be met by means of a deal or a business-like transaction. In this deal, we unconsciously regard ourselves as products for sale. We feel the need to attract customers and consequently we end up spending a lot of time on appearance based on the images that are presented to us by mass media. We regard ourselves and others as products and not as persons. In this kind of an exchange, Merton writes: “we do not give ourselves in love, we make a deal that will enhance our own product…. This view, which equates love with a glamorous package, is based on the idea of love as a mechanism of instinctive needs.”
In addition to the popular culture’s distorted images of love as romance, the way we have been raised by our parents is also responsible for the cynicism that many of us feel about love. When children are raised in dysfunctional families where they receive no words of love and affirmation but only cruel words that are accompanied with harsh punishments, they grow up with a much distorted perspective of love. Experts on the subject of love are unanimous that there is nothing that creates more confusion about love in the minds of children than unkind and cruel punishments that are meted out to them by their parents. Furthermore, when children find their parents do not love each other and are frequently engaged in quarrels, it creates what Erich Fromm describes, in ***The Art of Loving***, as a “neurotic disturbance” in the children regarding their concepts of love, and they learn pretty early on to question the meaning of love.
Experts also point out that apart from developing a cynical, negative view of love, the children’s self-concept is likely to be scarred forever from such cruel and harsh treatments at home. Research findings consistently indicate that these children who have been exposed to verbal and/or physical abuse at home usually end up in self-loathing, self-pity, self-doubts, and self-recriminations. While they may have many impressive accomplishments to their credit, their self-esteem is often found to be quite low, which is reflected either in lack of confidence or an over exaggerated sense of them. When it comes to love, these folks tend to imitate their parents’ dysfunctional lives because they do not know any better.
In many cultures, especially Asian ones, where parents are known to sacrifice everything in order to help their children succeed in life and there is a combination of a high degree of care coupled with physical punishments as well as lack of any words of affirmation, this kind of lovelessness is often perceived as being normal. Children in such families often grow up believing in the cultural myth that verbal and/or physical abuse of children coexists with love.
In the essay, When My Father Hit Me, Bob Shelby writes quite poignantly how he was always beaten up by his dad and that the beatings became pretty much a part of his growing up. Shelby admits that he has no doubt in his mind that his dad loved and cared for him because if his dad didn’t he wouldn’t physically hit Shelby. This kind of thinking needs to be debunked because, as Bell Hooks, reminds us: “abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love.”
On the flip side of the coin, there are families everywhere where children are never punished and they are recipients of words of love and various kinds of gifts. These children grow up thinking love is all about receiving and not giving. Experts point out that this is also ineffective parenting because the children think love is all about getting one’s needs and desires satisfied. This kind of thinking precludes children to acquire any kind of deeper emotional understanding of love.
In The Art of Loving, Fromm explains in detail the various kinds of neurotic or pseudo love that an individual from a dysfunctional family tends to display. Fromm labels the first kind of pseudo-love as “idolatrous love.” When an individual is raised in a dysfunctional family and does not have a healthy self-concept, it is very likely that the person will look for someone to idolize in order to fill the great sense of emptiness in her/his life. Since this person is not fully confident of her/his own power and abilities, she/he will project them onto the loved person in a way that Fromm describes as: the “summum bonum, the bearer of all love, all light, all bliss…” This is a highly unhealthy kind of love because the individual chooses to give up her/ his power and in the process loses herself/himself completely to the loved person.
For Fromm, the second kind of pseudo-love is called “sentimental love.” Since the individual was raised in a loveless environment, she/he gets to experience love only in the form of fantasy. Fromm explains that this kind of love is mostly found in the “vicarious love satisfaction experienced by the consumer of screen pictures, magazine love stories and love songs.
All the unfulfilled desires for love, union, and closeness find their satisfaction in the consumption of these products.” According to Fromm, there is another aspect of sentimental love, which is abstractification of love in terms of time. This is evidenced when a couple find themselves to be deeply moved by their memories of their past although when this love happened in the past there was no love experienced. The couple may even fantasize about their love in the future. From Fromm’s perspective, this kind of love is not real because the couple chooses to live either in the past or in the future but not in the present.
There’s a third kind of pseudo-love, which Fromm describes as “projective mechanism.” This is evidenced when an individual tends to avoid her/his own problems and gets overly concerned with the challenges that the loved one is confronted with and finds a sense of fulfillment in doing so. There are also cases where both individuals engage in such acts, thereby transforming love into one of mutual projection. This is also not real love because the individuals concerned choose to ignore their own problems and therefore they fail to take concrete steps to improve their own deficiencies, which would help them in their loving relationship.
When we face disappointments and heartaches in our pursuits of love and find out that it’s nothing like what we have been led to believe by popular culture, we often dismiss love as a sorry illusion. Some of us even decide that we are through with love because it takes much more from us than it ever gives back. We are often socialized into thinking that if there’s pain in our loving relationship, it implies we are bad at love. Or that love is something that is for the “naïve, the weak, the hopelessly romantic.” What’s worse, many of us are trained to think that love is something that we are all experts of and that there’s no need for us to learn about it. Nothing can be further from the truth.
The fact that we are mostly ignorant and inept when it comes to the understanding and practising of love is evidenced by all the broken relationships and the high rate of divorces. In order to dispel these misconceptions and misunderstandings of love, leading experts have frequently argued that we need to have it as part of the curriculum in our education. The need for understanding the nature and practice of love was even felt by Saint Augustine sixteen hundred years ago when he argued that the essence of a good life is choosing the right things to love and loving them well. It’s time that our education focused not simply on the mind but on the heart as well where love dwells.
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