On Love and Reason

A Journey of Understanding Love

I began thinking about love years ago when I heard the term come up in talks at mosques. Love is something we normally start thinking about thanks to television and movies, or maybe within families but my first serious engagement around it was through a spiritual lens. I would often hear that having love for your Creator and love for the Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him) were amongst the highest aims for a Muslim to strive towards. In this way love is a spiritual exercise.

I found it strange however that both love and spirituality are two concepts that rarely received the discussion space needed for me to come to understand them. Both terms relate to a fundamentally subjective experience. The subjectivity tends to take it away from the limited realm of topics that are discussed. We'll talk easily about those quantifiable and measurable sciences like physics, physiology and the like because they are in the shared objective world around us. Less easily we speak about common abstract topics like politics and economics. However, only with great hesitance do we engage in subjective experiences that are perhaps the most meaningful and universal, like love and spirituality. 

The first problem is that there is an insufficient vocabulary to speak about these topics. Because they are so closely tied to our emotions we often conclude that they cannot be, or aren't meant to be understood and instead they are to just be accepted. This is not to say that they are not expressed at all, in fact the expression of love and spirituality is most sought after, but the expression tends to take the form of poetry and not prose. Through poetry a glimpse of what is felt can be expressed although I find most poetry to be largely insufficient in giving me an understanding of the concepts. I think in prose, I need prose.

The vagueness of understanding love has consequences. Expressions like "they love you they just have trouble showing it" are common and reflect the differences in what one expresses and the other perceives. I believe a common language or framework of understanding love is essential to allow the emotion to be translated to the rational. Even if the framework of understanding exists only within your mind. It may still be inconclusive and never "truly" capture what is felt; but certain people are rationalists and they need rational explanations of concepts to develop a framework of understanding.

What is this "Love"?
Instances in which love arises: from the personal "love yourself" to "love thy neighbour"; a parent's love for their child and the reciprocal; the most spoken about love between partners; and spiritual love. Each of these is different, we have an intuitive grasp of this but are we able to go beyond the intuition and describe these differences? More importantly, is a description of these differences useful in terms of negotiating and managing that specific relationship? 

Preceding a reflection on the conditions of love what may be useful is a general understanding of relationships. Relationships will always take place between two individuals, that seems to be obvious enough, except of course unless we're talking about a relationship with your self...which I will argue is the necessary starting point but that needs to be put on hold for now.

How to relationship:

1. Know who you are.

2. Know what you need from another human.

3. Find another human.

4. Try your absolute best to know the other human.

5. Decide if that human can give you what you need and what you can provide in return.

6. Establish rituals with the other human that define your relationship and allow needs to be fulfilled.

7. Recognize that humans change. (This is very important)

8. When you or the other human change decide how the change affects the relationship.  

NB: 

on points 1 and 4, knowing yourself and knowing another human is not easy. 

To know requires: 

a) care

b) to seek knowledge

on point 7, humans change all the time...it is important to constantly engage in conversations that allow you to gauge the nature and extent of the changes in order to adjust your expectations from the relationship accordingly.

Consider how the above applies to the relationship we have with ourselves, our parents, our Creator.

Care
Love requires care. It seems easier to describe why we care for someone rather than why we love them because in many ways care has a foundation in reason. We care for some human beings based on what they provide for us but this is based on our construction of a particular worldview, a specific creation of meaning. To say that we care for the company of person A over person B is to say that we find stimulation more appealing from one rather than another based on our definitions of what is valuable, what is meaningful, what is stimulating - a reasoned claim despite its roots in our various unique life experiences. The perception of care thus differs from the carer to the one being cared for.

Because there's a human need to socially interact. There's societal norm that dictates actions that can be misread as caring. I need to know why someone cares. How they show they care to ensure I'm not misreading etiquette or being a polite human for care. 

Understanding/knowing as a prerequisite for love: 
Some parents that claim to love their kids without knowing them, without having the type of conversations with them necessary for them to get to know their children and this is problematic, it leaves scars. Likewise many ritualistic actions are performed "for God" but without knowledge of God are these acts really meaningful for Him or is it like the child who gets all his material needs fulfilled without any emotional needs recognized?

Can we know another person? Can we know ourselves? We are dynamic so understanding requires constant dialogue aimed at knowing the other and the self. It might be best to understand knowing another person and knowing yourself as a metaphorical "peeling off of layers". Unfortunately none of us can see all of ourselves at any one time and simultaneously need to see all of yourself to truly know yourself. Furthermore, in any relationship the other will only be able to see a part of you at any one time and that instantaneous snapshot of you can only be an aspect of who you are, one that may be perceived differently by you and by the other. "Peeling off layers" is a mindset of acknowledging that I will never fully know another. That there will always be something more to know which has the advantage of making the other a fascinating subject of enquiry that never ceases to provide more beauty, grace, complexity but the disadvantage is that you have to accept that you will never, ever truly know another. Whatever idea we have of another could change at any moment as another layer is peeled away and complexities of character are revealed.

Change:

What happens when change happens within a person and when change happens in our perception of a person? Do we forsake the relationship or rather just adjust its nature? There must be a criteria for this based on a knowledge of why you are in the relationship, what are the essential elements of the person are beyond which the amount of change means they're no longer the person we entered into the relationship with.

Concluding thoughts:
This post is probably not the coherent and articulate piece it was intended to be. It was the result of many hours of grappling with these ideas, processes of internalization and difficult conversations. I hope there were some useful phrases and ideas that are helpful in developing these complex ideas within your mind.

I had written these lines without knowing exactly where to fit them in so thought I might as well drop them in at the end and you can decide.

- If you love it is your duty to understand, to listen, to care. If you don't do these things it reflects an element of laziness. If you don't do these things and still claim to love you're a liar. 

- To love is active, requires activity and thought and to assume otherwise causes pain.