Love's Many Faces

Love permeates the stories of our lives, whether we seek to 'write it off' altogether or authorise its inspiration. Being intensely engaged in relationship with another person is one of the greatest joys of being human. It also brings us up against ourselves, our insecurities and our failings. We bicker and fight, we get it wrong. We fall in love inappropriately and unequally. The agonies and disappointments of love can feel impossible to bear. Yet when love throws down the gauntlet (again) do we resist picking it up?

Poets and lovers express and live it, but despite being studies across the ages and cultures of humankind, love as a force can never be conclusively explained. We continue to seek to understand what remains a mystery. "The language of love is impossible, inadequate, immediately allusive... a flight of metaphors' writes Kristeva (1987, p.1).

The Ancient Greeks gave us six words for love, each of which has given rise to a plethora or different interpretations in the Western tradition. In short eros refers both to Eros, the god of love, and to erotic desire, most commonly sensual, but Plato also defined it as desire for the beautiful qualities of the object. Philia represents love as friendship, love of ideas, as in the word philosophy meaning love (philia) of wisdom (sophia). Agape means love of a spouse of family member as well as to welcome in friendship and to cherish. Storge means affection such as that of parents for offspring. Xenia is the Greek word for love of the stranger and is linked to love as hospitality. Nomos means law, by extension, submission to divine law.

These six words by no means cover the lexicon of love, nor other qualities that condition love, such as sympathy, generosity, loyalty, trust and fidelity. As well as the hindu bhakti, being enflamed with love as devotion for the divine, Buddhism delineates four boundless attitudes. which translate as: unconditional love, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity.

The Greeks also gave an account of a lively debate about different interpretations of one of these words, eros. Vestiges of three ideas generated at Plato's Symposium continue to influence our thinking about love. These are: love as pursuit of personal wholeness, love as based on lack, and love as a ladder towards higher ideals. In so far as these lend themselves to readings of love that are ultimately self-referential, they compromise the alterity, unique personhood and multi-dimensional nature of an ever-changing beloved other as Other.

'I love you'. That one word 'love' can encompass as many shades of meaning may be confusing, but it also speaks to nature of love's riches. We have a palette of emotional colours which may be implied in different measure by one word, 'love': awe, passion, desire, lust, excitement, compassion, friendliness, affiliation, care, concern, tenderness, affection and beneficence. We can express so much metaphysically, ontologically, and emotionally with three simple words. It is paying homage to one to another. It is Buber's 'I-thou', with love the bridge, a principle of connection, but which still retains a space between.

True love contains many aspects. We may feel enflamed with love's power, desirous of the well-being and happiness of our lover, compassionate for the beloved's suffering and wish for their greatest good. It falls short when we overemphasise one quality at the expense of another.

Eros alights on us unbidden, overpowering us like a sudden gust of wind that sweeps us off our feet. Just as quickly we wonder where it went. Does it mean that we don't love eachother anymore, or is it merely symptomatic of a natural ebb and flow in the tides of passion? Human beings are not good at understanding ambivalence, which is really polyvalence: how we can feel overwhelming infatuation followed by irritation, boredom, jealousy, possessiveness, all for the one person, in varying degrees at varying times. From the perspective of Bion's O, they are but passing weather fronts, accident not essence. We shouldn't take them so seriously!

It is not the passionately emotional nature of love that causes ethical problems but its motivation. If it is self-referential to the exclusion of the other as Other, a human being to be loved for his or her own sake, then it leads to a range of erroneous emotional evaluations based on what is to be good for me. It is the blind exclusivity of an egocentric direction of desire that needs to be surrendered, no the emotion itself, which can be harnessed in all its passionate intensity to love's true aim. We can be enflamed with ecstatic fires which burn up the last vestiges of the hardness of ego.

- Judith Pickering in her book, Being In Love.