Not too long ago, I wrote two pieces on love for Thought Leader, and because of events in my own life the subject has been on my mind again lately.
These events have compelled me to take a serious look at what one might call “the pragmatics of love”, because, no matter how convincing some of the philosophical understandings of love, which I addressed earlier, may be — Scheler’s, for example, which amounts to the affirmation of the beloved person being uniquely valuable to you — it is still inescapably the case that one’s actions, or behaviour towards someone you love (and who presumably loves or cares for you too), may either destroy that love or enhance it.
A love that is possessive, for example, could be every bit as destructive as one that is characterised by a certain degree of indifference — in fact, from a normative point of view, one may argue that neither of these would, strictly speaking, qualify as love in the “true” sense of the word. And yet, at a purely factual level, it is undeniable that there are many cases of “love” between people that manifest themselves precisely in those ways. Perhaps such instances could be considered as being perversions of love in the normative sense, that is, of what love could be at its “best”, when it is most fulfilling.
A clue to what this “normative” meaning of love is, is found in Plato’s account (which I have discussed before), and bears on his perspicacious observation, that love is “lacking” (mired in “poverty”) and resourceful at the same time. Any love relationship that somehow eradicates these aspects of love, will result in a perversion or distortion of love — such as in the many cases of marriage where the individuals involved do not experience any desire for the other any longer (if they ever did), “desire” being the marker of that “lack” which is inseparable from love. If two people feel that they “possess” each other to the degree that there is nothing in either that fuels the other’s desire any longer, love has disappeared. This is where the “pragmatics of love” enters the picture.
There is a well-known poetic statement from William Blake (which I recall here from memory) which captures well, metaphorically, what is at stake in the pragmatics of love — that is, it could be taken as a rough guideline for those seeking to know how they should keep love alive, or rekindle it, between themselves and their beloved. Blake remarked that (and forgive the patriarchal language; his words are true of men and women): “He who binds himself to a joy, does the winged life destroy; but he who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in eternity’s sunrise.”
What this means, should not be difficult to understand — it is perfectly commensurate with Plato’s notion of love, specifically as far as the “lack” in love implies that one’s love could never coincide with the distinctive being of one’s beloved. If it does, one has, perhaps inadvertently, unknowingly, “bound” oneself to the “joy’ that is one’s beloved. “Kissing” the joy “as it flies” implies, paradoxically, that unless one “frees” or “lets go” of one’s loved one, the love will be smothered together with the freedom required for reciprocal love.
This may sound like an easy formula to implement, as it were, but don’t be fooled by the deceptive exhortation, that one should “kiss the joy as it flies” — it is THE most difficult aspect of the pragmatics of love. But why should this be the case? Not only because, I believe, in most people there is a strong desire to exercise at least some degree of control over their lives, itself born from a need for psychic security, and therefore to try different strategies to “secure” their relationships with others — strategies that invariably end up undermining the imperative, to “free” one’s beloved.
There is another, stronger, reason why this is so difficult, however. Whether we like to acknowledge it or not, interpersonal communication is a darn sight more difficult than one would like to believe, not merely for all the usual reasons adduced for such difficulty, such as linguistic obstacles, different values, and so on. Too few people have recognised that individuals are configured differently in psychic terms — it is not merely the case that, as Aristotle said, humans are “rational animals”, nor even that the psychoanalytical corrective to that long-standing, traditional view (that our vaunted “rationality” is all too often tripped up by unconscious motives of which we are not consciously aware) points to a seriously complicating factor in our attempts to understand others or to communicate with them.
One should add to this — as Andrea Hurst’s theoretical elaboration on Lacan’s theory of the human subject so persuasively shows — that every human being’s psyche is articulated, not merely in a complex inter-linkage between the registers of the imaginary (the register of the self as ego), the symbolic (that of language as the medium of the social) and the real (the order of that in us which surpasses the ego as well as language). One of these usually dominates a person’s psychic life as motivating force, but WITHIN each of these registers there are also, to complexify things further, three possibilities of psychic inclination or dominance: the tendency to stabilise, totalise or control things, the countervailing tendency to break things up or incessantly question, undermine or fragment them, and thirdly the paradoxical tendency to negotiate the former two inclinations in the guise of a liberating and yet not completely shattering tendency, conjoined or alternating with a relatively, but not excessively stabilising (“control-freak”) inclination.
I have not here used the theoretical names that Dr Hurst has given these tendencies; that should be left to her to make public. Suffice it to say that she has articulated this novel theory on several occasions, most recently in a keynote address at the International Theoretical Psychology Conference in Nanjing, China, and that a paper by her on the theory will appear later this year in the South African Journal of Psychology.
The point of referring to her work is to emphasise that there are many factors at work to complicate, compromise, disturb or otherwise derail even the most sincere attempts at communication, and this ineluctably affects the pragmatics of love. The best that one can or could be expected to do in a love relationship is to try to fathom what the “dominant” psychic inclination is on the part of one’s beloved, and to keep that firmly in mind in all attempts to communicate with her or him.
The upshot of this is that, where lovers are not on “the same psychic wavelength”, compromises have to be made for such relationships to survive and, perhaps, to flourish.
In a world where love in the normative sense, with a corresponding pragmatics (however imperfect), is, in my judgment, something comparatively rare, I believe that it is worthwhile for people who love or care for each other to do their utmost to cultivate, at the level of a pragmatics as briefly conceived here, this psychic “ground” for the possibility of a fulfilling love relationship. But make no mistake — it is not easy. Much more could be said about this, but that must wait for another time.
A difficult one to comment on.
Remember these little notes? “love is making her bed”, “love is giving her a flower” and many other “little” things one can do for a loved one.
Than sex comes into the equation and often all goes wrong. The possessive side in one (or maybe both) partners comes into play.
Even in polygamy, polyamor and other tolerant relationship formats, the possessive mind can turn things into hell between lovers.
Could it be that “sex” (nature driven) is -in our society/culture- too closely linked to “love” (emotionally or rationally driven)?
Yes, I do know the relevant bible texts. But the bible is only a few thousand years old and has been proven wrong at times. Nature is much older. What if we create a society where “love” is the basis for living together and have a family and “sex” is for fun whenever, wherever and with whomever is consenting. Would couples and families stay together for longer? Or would the possessive side create more problems in the long run.
I try my best not to make a statement pro or con. Just asking questions based on observations of my surroundings.
Love is a funny thing. So is sex. Both have a solid place in our lives. The two together often cause conflict in many minds and relationships.
Yes, I am a male species! Does that really make a difference?
Love and loving is something you DO, rather than read about. It’s like a hole in the ground — you have to dig it. You can read everything about holes for a whole year, but a hole won’t just happen by itself. Someone’s got to dig it. (It’s called “holism” in some quarters. But I could be wholly wrong.)
Jon – At last a sensible comment from you! Pragmatics is precisely about doing; but don’t underestimate the extent to which reading about doing can give you valuable clues about ‘what’ to do, and ‘how’ do to it!
Benzol – a valuable comment. I have dwelt on the sex/love tension (it IS a tension, all right) in a previous post on love, and I am glad that you have brought it into the fray here. Too often people mistake the one for the other, but they are not identical.
One of the most important precursors to a discussion about love is to make a distinction between love and attachment. The notion of romantic love which our culture sets on a pedestal is very often not love at all, but simply an artifically ennobled form of base desire.
The distinction between love and attachment is very simple. To love someone is to wish them happiness and to act accordingly. To be attached to someone is to seek one’s own happiness from that person.
Love leads to selflessness and a relationship of true generosity. Attachment leads to clinginess and pain.
In most romantic relationships there is a great mixture of love and attachment, but the problems that come from romantic relationships are due entirely to attachment and not at all to love. (The desire that one’s ‘beloved’ be in one’s presence all the time is not due to love but to attachment, predicated as it is on the belief that his/her presence is necessary for one’s own happiness, with little or regard as to his/her own happiness.)
Love — the wish for someone else to be happy — is pure, selfless, and creates no problems. It is only when one starts to worry about oneself and one’s own happiness — i.e. when attachment begins — that problems start.
Is Sting’s “If you love somebody, set them free” (which resonates with Blake) not just an excuse for screwing around?
@van Wyk: “……an excuse for screwing around?” Is that not what mankind has been doing anyway for millions of years? Written history about kings and queens, heroes and heroines confirms this. No reason to think that only the high society was doing this. Contemporary daily news confirms that the lower layers of society do it also. No reason to believe that similar things did not happen a few million years ago.
I have loved several men in my lifetime, each for different reasons, but only one with whom I felt myself to be ‘on the same wavelength’. Oddly enough, I had given up the notion of ever meeting a man who would share that elusive psychic/emotional/intellectual ‘wavelength’–all of the obvious candidates having been in either the ‘seminary or the cemetery’ as my sister put it!
So profound was the communication between this man and me that it made me question whether the ‘compromise’ relationships were indeed based on ‘love’ or more on the decision to ‘love’.
The harmony that characterises ‘being on the same wavelength’ is more often experienced in deep and lasting friendships. I have been most forutnate in that regard and have a lifelong friend with whom I share implicit trust that survived has nearly forty years, including living an ocean apart for much of the past 15 years. Perhaps the experience of such a close bond ‘spoils’ us in a way so that we look for that same sort of emotional compatibility with a man and rarely find it because of the ‘normative’ differences in thinking and communication styles between men and women as noted by Carol Gilligan and Deborah Tannen, for example.
Whatever the case, nothing apart from deep friendship had prepared me to encounter a man with whom communication was ‘effortless’. We seemed to understand each other in much the same intuitive way as my friends and I do.
Running out of space…TBC
One great test of friendship is the ability to work together. My best friend and I have often provoked the observation that we work almost as ‘one person’ and for me that is the ‘litmus test’ for the ‘pragmatics’ of love.
To complement each other’s contribution in a joint effort–and to do so without competition or conflict–is one of the most rewarding experiences in life. Many women friends express frustration at NOT having that sort of relationship with their husbands/lovers and cannot understand why it is so much easier to work with a good friend. They feel that we ‘should’ be able to have that deep level of compatibility with our life partners and I agree. Lack of deep compatibility is ennervating and eventually leads either to withdrawal (“I’d rather do it myself”) or resignation (‘All right, we’ll do it your way”). As emotional energy drains away, resentment builds and leads to conflict or indifference and ‘numbing’.
Relationships based on physical attraction, the search for ‘security’, or someone to ‘need’ us, makes deep compatibility is unlikely. And yet I would suggest that most relationships are ‘need’ based, often as an alternative to ‘being alone’.
As a natural ‘hermit’ in many ways, I have been spared the fear of ‘being alone’, a very fortunate thing in my view. Perhaps, that is something we need to address more during the formative years of childhood. A certain amount of emotional self-sufficiency might help to avert disastrous unions.
“I and Thou”
Even the most seamless compatibility between two people must admit of separateness for the simple reason that ‘becoming one’ is impossible–and undesirable. The paradox of two who often think or act as ‘one’ is much more fascinating than a complete ‘merger’ of personalities. Social philosophers Woolstonecraft and Godwin, historians Will and Ariel Durant, eco-academics Peter and Rosemary Grant, cancer researchers Yuan Chang and Patrick Moore, the late Robert and Joan Downe–all very strong individuals–shared a lifelong passionate love that diminished neither of them and whilst creating an impressive body of work in their various fields.
Together, yet separate, is the great paradox of healthy love. The ‘pragmatics’ of providing the emotional, psychic and physical space necessary to each other is an on-going process. It requires flexibililty and deep levels of trust in the other.
And yet no matter how close we are to the beloved, certain ‘boundaries’ are essential in preventing either partner from becoming dominant or exploitive of the other. “No” is just as important in love as ‘”yes”. Saying “no” (gently wherever possible!) to something that is not right for us is not the same as rejecting the other.
Only repeated instances of having to agree to disagree will ensure that our awareness of the separation between “I” and “Thou” brings a deeper level of understanding and respect without inciting resentment. The best relationships are creative ones in which appreciation for the other’s abilities is a primary value.
Dr. Hurst’s insight, and theoretical formulation of, the subtle variants in ‘psychic inclinations’ I find both brilliant and persuasive.
“WITHIN each of these registers there are also…three possibilities of psychic inclination or dominance:
1: The tendency to stabilise, totalise or control things,
2: The countervailing tendency to break things up or incessantly question, undermine or fragment them, and
3: The paradoxical tendency to negotiate the former two inclinations in the guise of a liberating and yet not completely shattering tendency, conjoined or alternating with a relatively, but not excessively stabilising (”control-freak”) inclination.”
If one may refer to this as a typology for convenience sake, it is the third ‘type’ that is most difficult to deal with in a love relationship, particularly if these tendencies are ‘”..in the GUISE of a liberating” effect which is linked to a “…not excessively stabilising inclination”. This suggests conscious manipulation of a very subtle kind. The paradoxical social ‘revolutionary’ who demands ‘liberation’ whilst undermining his mate’s identity as a separate person seems to me an example of Dr. Hurst’s paradoxical type 3.
Overt manipulation and semi-overt manipulation of the usual passive-aggresive type are difficult enough to deal with. The combination of liberator-controller is, in my view, nearly impossible to deal with. Much of true motivation of such a person may be so deeply repressed as to be ‘unconscious’, especially if this style of relating is generalised. The conscious aspects of it are where manipulation enter the picture.
“…in the GUISE of”
I picture the subtle ‘control freak/liberator’ relationship in terms of a child’s ‘see-saw’. The balance is ultimately controlled by the…well, Controller. But there is an infinity of variables between the highest and lowest points of elevation as the (heavier) liberator/controller seems to give over control to the less weighty partner who senses– at some level –that the (psychically) ‘heavier’ partner ultimately controls the board on which both are perched and hence controls the ‘tipping point’ in the relationship.
Covert hostility governs a great deal of the interaction in such relationships and attempts to expose the dynamics of that hostility to examination are usually avoided or subverted. Occasional insights by the partner are deflected, usually with ridicule or, at a more subtle level, by partial admission of mixed intent (the love/hate phenomenon) expressed with apparent remorse (“Let’s kiss and make up; “I’ll try to improve’”. Read as: “I’ll be more subtle next time”). Direct confrontation is rare; the hidden dynamics must be preserved in order for the relationship to survive.
And there is nub of the problem: the ‘disguised’ liberator/controller may actually be more dependent on the survival of the relationship than his/her partner and hence has more to ‘lose’. Is this ‘love’? There may be much that is good and mutually fulfilling in such a relationship. There may even be much affection and passion. But one must ask, can ‘love’ and manipulation co-exist?
Paddy – The distinction between love and attachment is a very valuable one, that is consonant with what I tried to say about the ‘pragmatics’ of love, and has everything to do with the question, whether a ‘love’-relationship can truly be a ‘love’- relationship. ‘Attachment’ would in the long run undermine the possibility of love.
Siobhan – among your valuable comments I’d like to single out your remarks about Andrea Hurst’s ‘paradoxical’ variety of ‘passion’ (as she calls it). I don’t think that is how she understands it – I mean, in terms of the ‘liberator-controller’, which you so eloquently describe. The ‘liberator-controller’ is more a contradiction than a paradox, as passions go, and corresponds perfectly with what Heidegger calls ‘managerial solicitude’, where one feigns solicitude, but just in order to manipulate the other all the more effectively, as you show so well. What Andrea means by the paradoxical variety (when it comes to loving), I believe, is captured well in D.H. Lawrence’s image of the eponymous Rainbow (in his novel), which signifies two individuals in a love-relationship where the ‘feet’ of the rainbow represents the freedom of each, because the feet of a rainbow can never coincide, while the arch of the rainbow represents the multifaceted bond between them. The paradox is this: for love to flourish, each lover must be ‘free’, but at the same time, for it to be a love-relationship, there must be some kind of bond.
Ah, I got the wrong of the end of the stick! Thanks for the clarification, Bert, and apologies to Dr. Hurst for the mis-reading.
If I may, I’d like to ruminate a little on ‘the same wavelength’ phenomenon. I have struggled with this all of my life, I think. Spontaneous affinities are the basis of most deep friendships. That ‘affinity’ seems to include not only a set of common interests or values but also a simultaneity of perception in terms of how we interpret experience as it occurs (moment by moment). This is how I see ‘being on the same wavelength’; it either ‘happens’ or it doesn’t.
I don’t think it can be ‘engineered’ as a way of improving the quality of a relationship. We CAN learn to appreciate another’s very different style of perception but if it is ‘very different’ from our own, we can’t ‘share’ it, we can only observe it. In such relationships there is always a greater distance than between people who share the same wavelength on crucial issues in life. Which is not to say that people who are on the same wavelength most of the time have no significant differences some of the time but that the unifying factor is the shared wavelength.
When the wavelength is shared between a heterosexual couple, the union tends to be profound–and rare, whereas it is more common between same sex friends. As Yul Brynner said: “Tis a puzzlement”!