Part 1:  What it isn’t
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By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

I don’t believe that romantic love has much to do with truly loving. We see romance in movies that evoke our longing, inspire delight, and gratify our hope that two characters will realize they are meant for each other and find happiness.

We don’t see many movies that go back five years later and discover that the two are not so happy. Statistical studies indicate that they won’t even be together.

We hear about romantic love in so much of popular music. But the blues are a more accurate expression of romantic love’s lived experience, although they offer scant insight as to how to live and love differently.

I do hear fewer giddy pop songs today than I heard in my youth. I fear that this is less about a latter day increase in realism about love than it is a low-level and unconscious despair. The difference between the two is a belief, supported by persuasive evidence, that there exists a means for sustaining love.

I have a number of acquaintances who came together in arranged marriages. The proportion of them that is happy in their relationships is greater than the proportion of my acquaintances who came together by means of romance.

Those cultures where we find romantic love are overwhelmingly cultures in which infants have only one caretaker. Writing forty years ago, the social psychologist Phillip Slater suggested that at its roots, romantic love is Oedipal love.

Not in the sense that we want to have sex with our caretaker. Rather, that our first experience of love shapes our taken-for-granted expectations of what love is. And in that first experience, we were loved even though we were helpless, demanding, and pooped in our pants.

Of course, not all of us got that kind of love. But the longing for it, and the expectation that we’ll receive it in a romantic relationship endures.

No adult can receive the kind of love that a caring parent can bestow on an infant. The means of emerging from addiction to that illusion is to recognize it as such and fully grieve its loss. We will never again experience it, in the same way that we will never again interact with a dead loved one. Deep acceptance of that opens us to the rich possibilities for genuine love that are all around us.

But we often don’t recognize such possibilities unless they resemble the particular shape and pattern of that first infantile love relationship. What we call love is more about chemistry than clear recognition of the loved one. The catalyst for such chemistry is often those specific resemblances.

They can be negative as well as positive. We are often drawn to someone who treats us in the same way our first caretaker did, whether it was good or bad. We respond passionately in the powerful but unconscious hope that this time we can get it right. This time we can evoke his or her caring. This time, we can be the kind of person whom she or he will always love.

But the loved one is drawn to us for the same reason. So each of us restimulates the behavior patterns that the other evolved to manage the distress and disappointment of the first relationship. Because we are unconsciously acting out patterns, we can’t clearly see the other’s uniqueness. We attribute meaning to the other’s behavior that may have little to do with his or her true intentions.

Our acting out these misperceptions, in turn, fuels the other’s patterns and growing hopelessness about being seen, until we eventually give up, end the relationship, and find a new one in which we recreate the same patterns.

We can’t love what we don’t know. And knowing means setting aside our need-driven misperceptions and the fantasies that we project onto the other. But when we do have deep knowledge of loved one, we see how hard they are trying, given their past and present circumstances. Then, it is hard not to love someone.

I hear people talk about falling in love as if it’s something that just happened to them. Regrettably, no longer being in love is something that just seems to happen as well. If we’re falling, we’re powerless. We don’t have the ability to clearly choose whom to love, how to love, and how to sustain and deepen it.

I also hear people talk about love as if they are economic players in a capitalist love market. And this market is located within an economy of scarcity. They must horde their love and make the right investment. If they don’t, they risk losing love and becoming emotionally impoverished.

No matter how materially poor or wealthy we are, we have the capacity to love. Nor is there a fixed limit to how much we can love. Loving and being loved can help to soften poverty’s brutal impacts. And no matter how wealthy we are, without love, we are poor.

Writing to the Corinthians, Saint Paul told us what love is not:  “It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

How about some movies and songs about that kind of love?