ALL ABOUT LOVE

For most of us love is the most absorbing subject in existence. There is an enormous range of meanings in this one little word: mother love and self love, father love and children’s love for their parents; there are brotherly love and love of one’s home and country; love of one’s home and country; love of money and love of power. Preachers insist that we should love God. Jesus adjures us to love our enemies. Love clearly includes all these usages, but the love in which one can be is the preeminent love for most of us.

Love at its fullest can include an enormous range of emotions and sentiments. It can combine humility with pride, passion with peace, self-assertion with self –surrender; it can reconcile violence of feeling with tenderness; it can sublimate sexual desire into joy and the realization of a fuller life.

“Being in love” is love at its most intense, and personally focused in a very special way. Our common speech reflects this fact. We talk of “falling in love,” as if it was something into which we are precipitated against our will, like falling into a pond. Love at first sight is a well-established phenomenon, no less surprising as a scientific fact than as a personal experience. Lovers are obsessed by the image of the loved ones, to whom they ascribe every virtue and merit; outside observers of the phenomenon speak of the lover’s “madness” or “blindness.” the lover experiences a heightened vitality and finds new significance in life.

For the lover, merely to see the beloved is to feast the soul; and to touch her (or him) is bliss. But when the two souls can interpenetrate, an even more magical state is achieved. The sense of “going out” of our essential being to another is one of the hallmarks of being in love.

Falling in love is irrational, or at least nonrational. The emotions involved are so volient as to override our reason. But reason and experience can play a part later. a point may suddenly be reached at which the lover’s eyes are opened, and he falls out of love as he once fell in. many teen-age “crushes,” many cases of calf love, though they may provide necessary experience to the callow personality, are soon out-grown.

Luckily for the human race, love often chooses aright. Then reason and experience may give it eyes to see, and may transform a transient madness into the highest and most enduring sanity.

There is a distinction between love and sex. Sexual desire by itself is lust; it is universally regarded as immoral. But for true lovers, the act of physical union is motivated not merely by a desire for pleasure but for the transcendent sense of total union which can be bring.

At puberty the sex impulse intrudes-strong, new, often frightening. The adolescent’s central problem is how to incorporate this intruding force into his developing personality and how to integrate sex and love. At puberty, too, romantic idealism raises its head; so that another problem of adolescence is how to reconcile this with the hard facts of practical living.

Sexual desires arise several years before marriage is desirable or possible. Different cultures have met this problem is different ways. In 18th-century England and France it was the acknowledged thing for upper-class young men to take a mistress. In American, dating and petting-the 20th century version of bundling-are the recognized compromise.

Other societies find other ways of gratifying adolescent love. In some cultures the boys live in communities with girls; only after some years do they marry, and then extramarital love is severely frowned on. Among the Bontoc Igorot of the Philippines (as with some European country folk, until quite recently) adolescent love-making served as a test of fertility. A girl could marry only if she conceived.

However, no advanced civilization has yet adequately resolved this conflict and in our modern life the problem is very real one. Clearly promiscuity and undisciplined indulgence are both bad-bad for the individual and bad for society. But the complete repression of sex is equally damaging, and so is the self-reproach that even the mere manifestation of the sexual adolescents who have had an exaggerated sense of sin imposed on them.

Man’s primal conflict is between love and hate. The human baby inevitably loves his mother as the fountainhead of his satisfaction and security. But he is also angry with her, as the power who rules over him, denying him satisfaction and thwarting his impulses. The child’s aggressive hat feelings soon come into violent conflict with his love, and the only method available to him to cope with this conflict is to repress his hate into his unconscious.

The infantile conflict between love and hate generates the primal sense of guilt, which is the rudimentary ethical mechanism. Around this mechanism, our conscience, put sense of right and wrong, is later constructed. Of course, reason and experience, imagination and ideals also contribute, but the underlying basis of conscience remains largely unconscious.

This is demonstrated by studies of children who were brought up in impersonal institutions. Many of these children never developed a conscience or the capacity for love. Mother love is thus indispensable for the development of children’s consciences and emotions. Mother love has been responsible for introducing tenderness into sexual love.

As a biologist, but also as a human being, I want to affirm the unique importance of love-an affirmation badly needed in a tormented age like ours, where violence and disillusion have joined forces with undigested technological advance to produce an atmosphere of cynicism and crude materialism.

Love is indispensable. Mother love is indispensable for children’s healthy and happy growth, both physical and spiritual. Personal love is indispensable both for the continuance of the species and for the full development of the individual. Love of beauty and of all lovely and wonderful things is indispensable for our growth. It brings reverence and a sense of transcendence into personal love, and indeed into all of life.

Love is a positive emotion, an enlargement of life; it leads on toward greater fulfillment and counteracts human hate and destructive impulses. In the words of a poet who was also a man of science-Robert Bridges:”…love is a fire in whose devouring flames all earthly ills are consumed.”