Love in the Continuous and Progressive Aspects

“Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.” This is a quote from Mr Rodgers that I remember reading in a self-published journal Kyla got at a ‘zine expo in Portland we went to several years back.  I don’t agree with most of it- first of all, I don’t think love is a noun at all- but it did get me thinking about what I think love actually is.  Love is something you do, not something you have.  A person can have love only in the same way you can have sleep- by doing it, you have it. If you don’t do it you won’t have it.  Love goes away in partnerships where people stop putting the work of trying to understand and appreciate each other.  This is not easy, but it is all we have.  Love is the truest expression of curiosity, and curiosity, being the mother of science, imagination, love, and wisdom, is all that we have that keeps our species from being nothing more than the most merciless killers ever to exist.

Paul is an Idiot

“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.  It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices the truth.  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”  So many weddings use these words from 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 as the pinnacle of God’s wisdom on love, but given that Paul was a self-important misogynist who basically admits to being a hypocrite and a liar (Romans 3:5-8, 1 Corinthians 21-22), I am inclined not to trust them.  Love is not patient- love, again, is a verb, not a noun, and cannot do anything without a person doing them.  If we take love as a verb, though, this makes patience a synonym for love, and I think this is perfectly true.  Without being patient, we cannot love.  To love is to be patient with others, to see their potential and to be helpful with the development of that potential.  Having love does not suddenly make us patient, but the act of loving requires us to be patient.

To say that love “does not insist on its own way,” however, is almost the opposite of the truth.  To me, we cannot force people to love us in the same way we love them; rather, we have to figure out with each person how we are going to love them.  We have to let the loving, the patience, the spirit of kindness find its way.  We cannot guide this.  Just like we cannot expect to eat rice and hamburgers in the same way or cannot expect to run a marathon and do a pull-up using the same methods, we have to let the act of loving find the way it works with each person.

The truest line in this passage, and the most inspiring, is preceded immediately by the one that might be the most false.  Love indeed “rejoices the truth,” but as such it must also rejoice in any wrongdoing.  Loving means showing compassion, interest, and curiosity about a person.  If we only expect to find out good things about a person, we are not truly curious; we are only looking for confirmation of our faulty ideas of the person.  True loving embraces all the good and bad that we learn about a person, just as true science embraces things that disprove their hypotheses and true art embraces both the negative and positive of human experience.  If we love embracing the truth, loving can truly bear all things and endure all things.  If we only love our expectations of a person, love endures only until that mask we placed over them starts to crack.

Paul is Maybe Not So Dumb

 “For now we see in a mirror, dimly; but then we will see face to face.  Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”  I used to read this line from Paul (only a few sentences after the bit about love) as meaning some bullshit about how we can only think about the holy mysteries through human reason, which is a faulty mirror of our own perceptions, but after death we will see that all this stuff that seems like nonsense is in fact true.  HOWEVER, I think there is a truer and much more interesting meaning to it, when taken in the context of love.  When we meet a person, we see our ideas of that person more than we see them.  We fill in our ideas of their motivations, personalities, and thought process based on what we know of ourselves and others.  We do not see them, but only a mirror of ourselves, and we see into that mirror only dimly, since we know ourselves only shallowly.  But through loving, we can crack that mirror.  We can use our curiosity to see through our ideas of a person to who they really are.  The very goal of loving is this ability to meet face-to-face with another person- like knowing ourselves or achieving perfection in anything, this is an impossible goal.  The only goals worth working towards are the impossible ones.

Jung Love

No matter how much we work at loving, we will still project a large amount of ourselves onto the canvasses of other people.  Luckily, the knowledge gained by loving not only helps us to understand others that are different from our idea of ourselves.  It also helps expand our own idea of ourselves.   Through loving others, we learn different ways of thinking and feeling than what we are used to, and that expands the range of ways we can think and feel ourselves.  Loving helps us grow into a more complete version of ourselves.

According to Carl Jung, a true adult is a person who has synthesized the disparate elements of his or her psyche into a single, complete self.  The entire goal of Jung’s analytic psychology is to help people embrace the parts of themselves that are suppressed in favor of the very narrow personalities that we chose to adopt in life.  Personalities are ultimately very limiting things that serve only to help us react to the world without having to really think of how to react.  Through loving others, we learn about the personality traits that we have denied ourselves in favor of a personality that we can call our "own".

The World, the complete self

I recently had my Psychology students take a Briggs-Meyer personality test, which was based on Jungian personality types.  Every time I take this test, I come out as an INTJ.  This means that my dominant personality traits are that I am an introvert (though close to 45% extravert, so I’m growing in that area), intuitive (I interact with the world based on thought as opposed to observation), thinking (rather than feeling- not meaning that I do not have both, but that when I experience problems or try to help others, I try to understand things rationally rather than emotionally), and judging (not meaning that I think lowly of others, but rather that I prefer to have plans rather than take life as it comes).  In life, I will be more complete if I embrace the emotional, sensing, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants potential that exists within me, and the most effective way to do this is by loving extroverted, sensing, feeling, perceiving people.  This is true for all of us- loving very different people helps us to love those parts of ourselves we often do not even realize exist.  These "other" people do not need to be spouses- this can also mean friends, siblings, parents, coworkers, even our own children.  The point is to explore people who are truly different from you and through loving them to see them in yourself, rather than vice-versa. 

Love Like An Anthropologist

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”  Become a true adult.  Put away your childishness attachment to your personality and allow yourself to grow up.  Put an end to childish ways of expecting love like an infant expects from its mother and instead love like adults. Put and end to looking through a mirror dimly and try to figure out what these strange creatures in front of you actually are and how they think.  Love.

In case anybody was confused over the title, it is a reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_and_progressive_aspects, because I found out that my original title was already used as a John Mayer song and, come on, I have my pride.