Un/Conditional

I have been contemplating love, again. In particular, “I love <insert name here>, but…” or, “I really do love him/her/other, it’s just…” This makes me wonder if love is as much an organic thing as we’ve been led to believe. It seems that love is much more an act of will, the result of conscious decision and, yes, commitment. We say, sometimes (or rather we did when we were younger), “I love x, I’m just not in love with him/her/other.” This is an equivocation that has always irked me greatly, but perhaps being in love is that state where liking (as in friendship and attraction) combines with the impulse to love.

I think that liking someone is as much receiving as it is giving. We like a person or thing because of how we react to it. We may be able to describe the object in terms of how it makes us feel or in terms of our response to it. We can even influence others to like us – by the way we speak or dress or move. Loving, on the other hand, is entirely a one-way street – we love whether or not the object of that love returns it. Thus it is that we love our children and parents and even our partners when they hurt us, or piss us off, or are even unlovable in the eyes of others.

People sometimes find the commandment to love others, love your neighbour, love your enemies, love them that hate you – people find this a difficult or even impossible thing. I believe it requires a conscious act of will but that loving someone does not require me to like or even support the behaviours of the person I have decided to love. Occasionally, love may even require me to act against the person I love, as a parent needs to provide limits for a child, teach them to honour boundaries, to take the poisonous fruit away from them.

A couple of years ago, I realised that, among the many things I loathed about the current American president, was that his attitudes and, for lack of a better word, policies, poisoned my thinking to the point where I dearly wanted ill to befall him – in a way I have never experienced, even toward people I knew and thought I hated. Just lately, I have come to the realisation that, as in everything, while I cannot control these things that make me angry, I can, in fact, change my thinking, and remember that nothing makes me angry, but that I choose to be angry. There are some very good reasons to be angry, indeed, but the mere fact of this man’s existence is not one of them, and that I should not wish him ill, just because everything that comes from him is, frankly, hateful. I can in fact, reject the hateful, by refusing to respond in hate. I’m not yet at the stage where I can say that I love the Orange Monster (that sounds like a Sesame Street reference – my apologies to the Muppet Masters). But I am choosing not to hate him.

It helps, of course that I can vote for someone else. In fact, in the great state of Maine, I can vote for 5 others before my vote will count for him. And I can hope that there are enough people who choose to vote in hope rather than anger.