My last post discussed the first two of the three key stages of love. They were exciting and passionate and gifted with a wonderful ability to overlook the loved one’s flaws. They also had a use-by date and then the blinkers were off.
Here is what anthropologist Helen Fisher says about the third stage, which she calls the attachment phase:
“Perhaps this is the most elegant of human feelings, that sense of contentment, of sharing, of oneness with another human being. As you walk together holding hands, when you sit next to each other reading in the evening, as you laugh simultaneously at a movie or stroll through a park or on the beach, your souls are merged. All the world’s your paradise.”
Beautiful, isn’t it? Or perhaps it makes you cringe? Typing those words, it occurred to me that although it’s okay for poets or songwriters to express thoughts of love, it’s not something most people are comfortable doing. It’s almost as if it’s smarter or cooler to be cynical about it, which is fair enough, but I personally feel there’s not enough love in the world and I make no apologies for knowing exactly what Helen Fisher means.
If you do too, it's because you know how nourishing that kind of love is and that it exists alongside the whole range of emotions, including even flashes of rage. It can take many years, decades even, to achieve, and it’s absolutely worth the voyage, which is often parallel to the route to self-love. Acknowledging this love fills my heart with tenderness and thanks.
Many people are justifiably sceptical about love and marriage, especially with divorce skyrocketing and so many children living in single-parent households. But if almost half of all marriages break up, that means that more than half survive, which is quite an achievement. What’s more, the majority of people who divorce tend to marry again, so no doubt many eventually find that deeper, more “elegant” love with someone new.
Marriage isn’t compulsory, of course, and it is expected that it will occur less frequently in the future. Regardless of the form partnerships take, however, it’s a fair bet that people will continue to fall in love, pair up and try to find harmony together just as they always have.
Having the desire and intention to create that harmony is a major factor in achieving it. The high success rate of arranged marriages in India, where only 4 per cent of marriages end in divorce, seems to back this up. According to Helen Fisher, Hindu children are taught that marital love is the essence of life. Indian couples often enter married life with the expectation that romance will blossom and love will grow, and very often it does.
For those of us without such rules to live by, who make the big decisions all by ourselves, falling in love can be scary. “We’re never so defenceless against suffering as when we love,” said Sigmund Freud. Too true. Love takes courage.
Opening ourselves to love makes us vulnerable to loss. Many people, particularly if they lost someone close in their early lives, protect themselves from this pain by keeping love, and lovers, at a safe distance. Unfortunately, they miss out, and so does everyone around them.
To understand the nature of love, it's useful to consider its opposite. Although we learn in primary school that the opposite of love is hate, just as the opposite of hot is cold, it’s probably more accurate to think of the opposite of love as indifference or apathy. Love is caring, the opposite of indifference, and caring is also a component of hate – a person has to care enough to hate. It’s also possible, and a completely normal part of the human repertoire of feelings, to experience temporary flashes of hate for someone you love. Even a mother’s love, often held up as the ideal form, will include moments of less than ideal feelings, and women need to be able to accept this as normal and forgive themselves.
I will write more on the importance of love and affection for our babies in my next post.
Until then, I wish you love, and the ability to give it with abandon.
