Love and its Many Faces

           Many poets have written about it and many songwriters have praised it over the years, but what do we really know about love?  Is it something that would take you by surprise or is it something that would develop over time?  Is it the instant feeling of connection that binds two people?  Can love be qualified as the feeling between parents and their children and husbands to their wives?  Psychologists say that love is a cognitive and social phenomenon that has several degrees of manifestation depending on the emotion involved that could be intimacy, commitment or passion.  Simply put, love is a feeling born out of compassion, affection, and passion.

Psychologist Elaine Hatfield defined compassionate love as a feeling that involves mutual respect, trust, and affection.  This is a virtue in which emotional capacities of empathy are regarded as the foundation for a greater social interconnection and humanism.  The feeling of compassion is inherent to humans but classical philosophers thought that compassion must be disciplined by other virtues because as it is,  this would become a hindrance to situations natural to life like suffering.

Compassionate love is the level at which people love their friends or someone they perceive weaker than them.  This usually leads to the feeling of hero-worship where the weaker (usually a female) ‘falls in love’ with the stronger (usually a man).  Compassionate love between friends exists when they feel a natural sense of security, happiness and common ground together.

Look at a picture of a mother holding her child; one could see a connection between them, that is yet another manifestation of love which stems out of affection.  Affection is popularly used to denote a feeling amounting to more than goodwill or friendship.  Ethicists generally use the word to refer to distinct states of feeling, both lasting and spasmodic.  In the narrower sense, the word is connected to social or parental affection as part of a moral obligation.  American psychologist Henry Murray states that affection is a psychogenic need that plays a major role in developing our personality as it opens avenues that would develop past the feeling of moral obligations and become something stronger and enduring,

One of the bases of relationships today is what we call attraction or passion.  Passion is defined something intensely desired with strong emotion and feeling, often referring to one’s special activities or interests.  Dr. Robert Vallerand, of the University of Quebec identified two forms of passion: Obsessive passion—where passion controls the person—and harmonious passion—where the person controls the passion.  While harmonious passion has positive benefits and are more important to self-developmental efforts, obsessive passion can be destructive to the individual and those around him/her.

Elaine Berscheid and Elaine Walster (formerly Hatfield) proposed the distinction between love and passion and love as friendly companionship.  They construed that passionate love as a state of total absorption, including mood swings, intense emotion, and obsessive thinking.  Companionate love was identified as the affection between two people whose lives are deeply intertwined.

Most passionate relationships burn so hot then suddenly dwindle and die, ending with heartaches and sorrow.  Compassionate love sometimes loses its appeal as the protector or the protected may tire of the constant roles they play.  And affection burns out after one decides that the moral obligation has ended.  That is not to say that love doesn’t last because love takes hard work from both sides to really make it work.  Love could make you daft, love could make you care, love could make you weak at times, but true love, real love, actually makes you strong.  Love also has to be a free gift or it doesn’t hold any value at all.  But always remember that love is all you need, even the Beatles knew that.