"In Love We Trust?"

by: Andre Suprapto

“Love…is the great creative process”

-D.H. Lawrence-

Love is in the air… Love Actually… All you need is Love… PS: I Love you… We seem to just can’t get enough of love, can we? And it’s actually an undeniable fact that the defining theme of our generation’s culture and arts has been LOVE. Just like medieval-ism was the golden age of religious faith; the twentieth and the dawn of this century have been the age of the reinvention of that mythical mystery of the way of a man and a woman that always thrill our senses, and charms our emotions. However, to have love in a microscopic scrutiny, have we really fathom this bizarre concept or is it just a myth? 

Love. What a refreshing and at the same time revolting idea. From the day that we were born we have been completely surrounded by this four letter word, that we can actually see and hear it at anytime and anywhere, especially through the arts. 

For better or for worse, nothing stirs the emotions the more as art; and humans, since time beginning, have always exhausted their best artistic endeavour in composing poetry, singing songs, painting, and depicting dramatic scenes about love. 

Thanks to our age of instant media; the messages of love through the arts have become part of our daily bread. As we tuned in the radio in the morning, we will hear dozens of love songs played perpetually throughout the day. Switching on the TV what would we see; love movies with romantic final-scene kisses have become the defining epitome of the movie industry. Accordingly, we have unconsciously drifted under the influence of love in the hope that somewhere, sometime, and somehow, we will also experience that joyous thrill of love that the arts have depicted so beautifully. Indeed, as Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, said: “They (people) live for love, die for love, and kill for love. It can be stronger than the drive to stay alive.”

In February 2008, the TIME magazine ran an interesting special edition on the Science of Romance. Under strict Darwinian guidelines, the contributors to the stories scientifically deduced that, as pervasive and ubiquitous as love is, as grand and as irrational it may look; love can be boiled down to the imperative need of human reproduction. All the rituals of dating: trying to look and smell good and talk the right things at the right time are all simple procedures that we developed in order to impress our potential mating partner. Emotionality? Still left unexplained; “a nut science may never fully crack”. 

Confronted by such theory, and being an incurable romantic as I am, I revolted and rebutted that NO, love is not merely constrained in the biological realms of a human being. Given the fact that, in the universe of the feelings, nothing is as catchy and stupendously glamorous as love; it is very insulting to have someone say that our precious feeling of love is nothing more than the inclination of the genitals (I beg your pardon for being too blunt). It is very outrages and impertinent isn’t it? Because in our heart of hearts we believe that love is something more, love is… what is love??

Silence. 

I dropped my jaw and realized that, like a blind religious fanatic, I’m fighting for a concept that I didn’t even fully understand at the first place. 

What is love? 

When the books fail to give us answer to this idea of love, it’s our duty to be scientists ourselves, take all the materials that we can get about love in our own real life, and experimented on them in our mental laboratory. 

To fulfil this duty of describing love, I (on behalf of all the citizens of the world) must first take a step back, detach myself from any preconceived believe of love, and view this idea from a distant and safe perspective. Once I do that, once I snapped myself out of mythic concept of love and wake up to the vicious reality of everyday life, alas! I found myself demoralized.

To be honest, let’s ask ourselves, despite our ragging obsession over the idea of love, are we for real? Or are we deliberately faking it. Let us compare our everyday reality with the grand ideal of love that we have cloth ourselves with. What will you get? An ironic and bizarre contrast. With the omnipresence of love in our daily lives, we have fooled ourselves by a facade that displays us as “love centered beings”. Let the facts prevail over pretended believes. If we really take love seriously, why do we still cannot understand and respect the sanctity of marriage as we should be because marriage is the final crown of a solid, mutual love. (You and I must know someone from real life who has gotten a divorce, getting one, or not getting one but having a hell of a dysfunctional marriage/covert-divorce). Thus, having failed to put our trust in marriage, we have made our marriage institution a grand masquerade, with divorce just waiting around the corner.

Indeed, it is my long held believe that the ultimate display of love’s death (more precisely love’s nonexistence) is divorce. What I mean is, if love is really that tenacious glue that obstinately bond a man and a woman, which our pop culture has preached us to believe for almost 24/7, then divorce must be something unknown and alien to us. But reality bites, we break up (divorce) more than we make up (having a happy marriage). The ergo of these premises would be: love is just a lie then, or at best it exists only in its early stages, in dating or uncommitted relationship. Once you solidify it with a ring and a lifetime commitment, love subsides. Thus, love is a mirage after all. 

(The irony of our issue here is this, divorce, which has become a trend that wins followers by the thousands nowadays, is much inspired by our artists who produced ‘love’ at the first place.)

By merely seeing the world around me, I began to concur to that irritating Darwinian view of love; that love is probably a moral platitude. It’s a pseudo feeling invented by us in order to lure our sexual/ mating partner to have intercourse. (It’s less intimidating and safe to say to a woman “I love you”, rather than to go straight forward and say “Let’s get laid”). Once that goal is satisfied, and one is demanded to bring a relationship out of mere biological circumstances, love fled the scene. And speaking of divorce, it has a tinge of Darwin as well isn’t it; it is about leaving someone in light of self preservation or finding another more survival-fit mating partner. Such selfish genes as we are. 

But strangely, this still doesn’t make sense. Despite the fact that artists fail to practice what they preach (how the Brangelina fiasco shattered our hope in love) we still prone to love and artists seem to have never run out of idea to create love-themed arts. Songs and movies about love seem to have come from an eternal fountain of inspiration, which always come in fresh packages that would immediately catch our eyes. Thus it goes that, in reality, love is dying everywhere, but in the art world love is alive and well; and we are the most loyal consumers of love. (It seems that in the matter of love: Oscar Wilde-an aphorism of “life imitating art” nor the contrary “art imitating life” are not applicable at all; it is “life and art going respectfully their own separate ways”).

Before we go any further, I would like to draw a comparison between the irony of love and the irony of the US almighty dollar. Yes, we all know how the American bank note has the provocative slogan “In God We Trust” at its center. It’s rather ironic don’t you think? Being one of the proponent nations that taught us the freedom of secularism (with the utterly secular France as the runner up) America displays a religious slogan on the most expedient, effective media to indoctrinate its people, which they literally can’t live without, money.

Yet, a little perusal on the matter will only bring us to a totally different reality than what the words in the green paper actually suggest. No, for average American, God is not to be trusted, it is an ancient, obsolete conception that must not even be considered as a reality. God is a problem to abortion, same-sex marriage, to rationality, the only god that can be trusted is the green dollar itself. (Thanks-giving is a turkey-day, Easter is a bunny and eggs day, and Christmas is a shopping day.)

Relating this to our core issue, do we really trust in love or is it just an insipid and exaggerated word? There’s a link missing somewhere that has caused this sad irony of love. Such missing link, I think, lies on how we have misinterpreted love in the first place.

I. What to unlearn

“Loving and possessing, conquering and consuming – that is his way of knowing.”
-Albert Camus on Don Juan-ism, The Myth of Sisyphus- 

Love is a conundrum. The more we try to answer the questions about love and try to understand love, the more the questions ramify and become more complex. This is why, writing this piece is probably the most tiresome thinking that I have ever done in my life. 

So, I will not try to understand love by explaining why people fall in love (causes of love); but I will try to understand it by merely having a retrospection of (a) when I feel I was out of love, and (b) when I feel I was in love (and draw a conclusion from them). Since, to try to go the same road as what the TIME magazine correspondents went through (i.e., trying to explain the causes of love which eventually lead them to the conclusion that love resides under the pants), will only going to give me a fool’s end. Beside, in my subjective opinion; love cannot be fully described and explained, it’s an experience, and you know you love when you love. Indeed, trying to explain why you are in love is a kiss of death. Thus, to make myself absolutely clear: this will not be an explanation of WHY, but WHEN people (or especially me) feel in love.

Firstly, let us start with a bad news; I will share to you all, my dear readers, my experience of being out of love. 

To begin with, according to an international preacher whose sermons I often listen to, love is probably the most misunderstood and misinterpreted word in our time. And above anything else, from what I knew and experienced, I felt out of love when I misinterpreted it with two things: possession and sex.

In my perverted understanding before, love only about possesses a woman. All the things I did in the name of love are conducted for that end; to have a woman, period. To serve that prideful end, I also applied a prideful means. I will explain this by quoting some excerpts from my daily journal as follows:

[an entry in January 2008];

“Love is the exact opposite of warfare, but I treat it like one. In my not too glamorous romantic career, I always abide by this simple principle: attack hard, but never pursue. I call this as the “subtle and cautiously offensive” strategy. In application, thus far I always conducted a well thought-out, deliberate, and romantically-genius attacks toward a woman that I find interest in; but if the object shows the slightest sign of avoidance, or disinterestedness, I abort my mission, turn to the next target. “I will not over-pursue you”, said I to myself as I walked out to another battle of politeness and pretentious sweetness (which hooking up basically is). Since I operate in a heartless and emotionless style, nothing weighs on my conscience, and I sleep tight at night.”

[an entry in August 2008];

“Indeed, for me, a romantic engagement is hardly different from a military battle, both of which involve a glorious conquest or a shameful defeat - with disgusting separating the two. Like the ridiculous defeat of Napoleon in his Moscow campaign (caused by his clumsiness to pursue), similar goes in a romantic campaign, by pursuing we let the enemy grow strength while we exhaust ours. Or to take wisdom from our everyday events; in a market transaction, the one who seemingly avoid to bargain gains the upper hand. And, being an egoist as I am, I will not give women the luxury of gaining the upper hand over me." 

Interestingly, this bleak rule of engagement that I have followed in the utmost discipline has won me some worthwhile exploits. Women, ironically, are drawn toward a man’s coldness and sense of detachment. It’s an unwritten law of our time isn’t it that bad boys are a lot sexier than sweet or delicate ones. And by being cold, seemingly not interested, not willing to pursue, I’m being bad. (Another application of Darwin’s sexual-selection principle: in the eyes of the women, cold men are more apt to protect her from such a violent and wild world, rather than soft ones). 

(This is actually insider information about some man’s psyche that I specially dedicate to my women readers. Trust me; don’t go for the seemingly cold man, as suave as they maybe, they are manipulative.) 

What inspired such shrewd stratagem, my pride. And what did I get from my above formula, did I experience love? Not at the slightest. From applying this maxim, I only experienced cruel, cold and loveless lust the by-product of which are merely spicy adventurous stories that I can flaunt around and brag about with friends in social occasions. Like a psychopath serial killer, the world of romance is merely about collecting “body counts” for my own personal trophies. Talking about being absurd.

So, this is when I felt I was out of love the most. Even though I had them in the palm of my hand, but all I felt inside me was nothing but utter excruciating pain of lovelessness. That was when I learned that love and pride (possession) is like oil and water. Or in other words, pride is love’s arch nemesis. They are completely irreconcilable. 

Secondly, I won’t discuss the issue of the mistranslation of love with sex outside than giving this mighty principle: “Love is not about making love.” If it were, it would be better for us to go look for love in a red light district, or a whore house isn’t it?


II. What should we do then?

We should love unconditionally. 

Above, it has been elaborated that when one (me) loves for the mere purpose of possessing, love fails to be born. From such backdrop, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist actually to arrive at the conclusion that detached of pride, detached of the arrogant imperative to possess, one may experience the truest meaning of the word; love. Yes, love; whose “shadows are so rich in joy” as St. Romeo of Verona eternally put it.

Let me break this issue down by using another case example (my own case again; it’s alright, for the glory of love I’ll let myself being dissected, studied and become a sample like a lab-rat). But first, let me briefly quote an interesting scene in Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague, as an opening. 

The Plague told the story of a public health physician, Dr. Bernard Rieux, who found himself in the middle of a deathly and gruesome cholera epidemic in the town of Oran. As he was asked by his fellow medical worker, Tarrou, as to what triggered him to help fight the epidemic under the risk of being infected himself, he answered that:

“What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you’d need to be a madman, or a coward, or stone blind to give in tamely to the plague…” [And as kept on prodded him to dwell deeper on the mater]:
“Who taught you all this doctor (Rieux)?”
The reply came promptly:
“Suffering”.

This existential dialogue was the auxiliary that made me understand that to love unconditionally is perhaps the only love that is solid and real. I learned this through my suffering of loving a woman one-sidedly. 

It is in the most dark and dangerous depth of the sea that treasures are buried. Same goes in life my friends, sometimes it is only when you hit rock bottom that you learn and find life’s most precious lessons. 

My ordeal, my trial of fire, started when I loved a woman (let’s name her Miss Z). I was madly in love with Miss Z with a kind of that is thunderous and full of vivacious passion. It was bold, beautiful and in heavy swirls, like those of Van Gogh’s paintings. It’s the most genuinely sweet feeling, a kind of which I never thought could enter my human heart; like the intense joy it produced which I never thought could ever be experienced by a human being. There’s a colossal degree of emotional ecstasy that I have by merely seeing her, admiring her perfect manners, her irresistible charm…by Jove! She is worth dying for; she brought out the gentlest part of my soul. When I see her, I want nothing else, and when I do not see her, I want nothing but her. In a word, she rocked my world. It was bliss. 

Unfortunately, in response to my innocent and fanatically violent love for her, Miss Z denied me and showed merciless scepticism over my feeling. I was devastated. 

Maybe some of you also have experienced what I experienced with Miss Z. You must be able to lucidly imagine in what kind of a desperate pit I was in when her cruel rejection was exercised on my holy and sincerely decorous love. I felt injured; it produced a wound that is very deadly in nature. Without proper mental strength, this kind of wound does kill, and in the history of the world, there probably have been thousands of people committed suicide because of what Hamlet called as: “the pang of despised love.” 

I barely survived through that hellish melancholy that her hostile rejection has caused me. I felt, why is it, at the time I really sensed that my love is true I have to be confronted by such heartless response. I was in the threshold of a grand and royal love, but its door was violently slammed before me. I felt like one condemned to death without first being told of his crimes?? Does she see it as a punishable felony for me to love her?? 

Like a wounded and bleeding soldier gasping for his last breath, I looked desperately around me to find for anything that I could use for cure. 

As a defence mechanism, I was left with two choices; either to retaliate and hate her back, or to wallow in self pity and let it slowly strangles my neck. (Fortunately, I didn’t make a pick between the two.) 

Melancholy has dangerous ends. Having known this, my inner instinct to survive; to at least fight back and refuse to be tamely subjected to such gloomy and unhealthy depression, kicked in. I stood my ground and forced myself to make a wise and mature decision over the matter. 

I tried to exhaust all my mental, intellectual and emotional resources in the purpose of properly assess the situation I was in, and to produce an applicable conclusion in the end. I determined to do the math, fill in the dots; how should I think and what should I do? 

Like I have stated earlier, Camus’ novel, The Plague, has helped me to stubbornly believe that no matter how senseless a suffering or tragedy is, it still has a lesson to teach men to “rise above themselves”. From such believe, I ceased to merely focus on the morbid pain she inflicted on me, but rather on the possible lesson that I might learn from it. 

A quest will be easily concluded when the knight has already started from a right direction. When I commenced my search for answer by initially having the faith that there must be a lesson that have to be learned out of that terrible tempest; I basically was walking on a right path. In a fiery quickness, an answer (or the inspiration to go find for an answer) came; from a very commonplace source: dictionary.

Yes, as a big fan of dictionary, it is often handy to try to define something, a concept by first defining its negation, its opposite. For example, Webster defined cold as the absence of heat. By this it follows, if you already know what heat/hot is, it would be easy for you to then define in the utmost precision what cold is, which is the total opposite of heat. And in the matter of love, I switched on my creative mode and theorized that, most likely, love can simply be defined by a negation: love is the absence of selfishness and pride (which both anchored in the idea of must having/possessing the beloved). From then I further philosophized that one can only experience the fullest meaning of love when one can actually love after being rejected (read: to love unconditionally). 

Eureka!! 

What a heart-warming relief it was to finally understand that my depressing melancholy all those time was simply caused by my inability to understand what love is at the first place. Like what the French said: “Knowing the causes of an illness cures it”; hence, my melancholy was immediately cured once I know what kind of devil that caused it; my own self, that big and terrible “I”.

Thus, by identifying the critical error that I made in defining that love is the same as possession, I was able to correct myself. Subsequently, an epiphany was born: I feel I’m in love the most when I’m able to love unconditionally.

III. Unconditional love (Love’s Labour’s Won)

I know, this unconventional idea of loving someone unconditionally might sound like a desperate excuse of a coward and defeated lover. It’s pretty much like a jumbo that we just cannot trust to ever possibly be had by venal creatures as us. Fair enough, it’s a tough sell; totally irrational.

But, as Pascal said, “the heart has its own reason that the mind doesn’t understand.” Believe me people; down with rationality, we got to swallow our pride in order to breathe in the refreshing air of pure love.

Too long we have devalued and demonized ourselves by believing that we are not capable of loving sincerely. In this crazy age of commerce; we seemed to have fallen so low in the mad obsession that the world has for profit by also treating our feelings as something for trade as well: “I love you, if you don’t love me back, deal’s off; next customer please!!”.

No! Love is the ultimate leap of faith. It’s about hard work and taking risk. The man who loves must work hard to prove it and take the risk that the object of his love might never love him back. (It’s the same as our faith in God, it’s about proving our faith through our works and taking the risk that there might be no God at all up there - Pascal’s wager).

For those who used to have everything justified by reason, here is a simple logic. What differentiates love from a quid pro business trade if I completely demand my beloved to love me back equally? Doesn’t such mindset decrease the value of our beloved to be a passive object of our narcissistic ego? This kind of thought is what Jean Paul Sartre wrote against: “the man who wants to be loved, doesn’t desire the enslavement of the beloved”. Isn’t it what we do when we think that the person that we love owe us an emotion that must be reciprocated in the same amount; (enslaving our beloved)? Consequently, no matter how implausible as it may seem, immaculate altruism is love’s gold standard.

“If you love those who love you, what thanks can you expect? Even sinners love those who love them.”

(Beside, a possessive lover is an irritating, immature lover right? Why can’t we broaden this universally accepted opinion by applying it even before we acquire the heart of our beloved: “I love her; I don’t need to possess her in order to continue to love her.”?)

I personally believe, especially now, in the inherent generosity of the human heart that will make us be able to love someone unconditionally, devoid of any ulterior motive of possession. (Going back to my case, even though I know that the absolute crystallization of happiness can be obtained by having her, but I got to let go. For love’s sake. When we force our will, we feed our ego than we feed our love.)

This is the manifesto of my heart. Paraphrasing Kierkegaard’s words, my creed goes as follows: “A lover who loves and is loved back, ‘conquered’ the beloved. But he who loves, but denied, spat upon, diabolically rejected, but still persisted in his love ‘conquered’ both the beloved and himself.” In the later case, the definition of love as we knew it has been altered, it has become a meta-feeling, a chromed feeling. And one is ‘canonized’, instantly ‘canonized’ with a sainthood when one is able to have that most irrational but sane and rapturous emotion.

This is what I’m offering, love in its crystal-clear and untarnished condition, which I call as; Love par excellence.

It’s a wine-like love. Wine aficionados would agree with me that the best wines in the world are made from vines that go through a rough growing process in sandy and poor soil. Vines grown in Bordeaux have to reach deeper into the earth to seek out nutrients and minerals that help produce superior products. Same goes with love. Love that does not walk the extra mile by enduring the test of time or rejection cannot be considered as a grand love. It’s just elementary and unripe, sour as it is. In my case, by Miss Z’s denunciation and distrustfulness, my love for her underwent a rough growing process. What is left is only its tasty inner sweetness. (Before her repudiation, my love for her was only a crude emotion, but after that, it is a fide: LOVE.)

Of course, I’m not trying to say that love is only real if it is unfulfilled or unbecoming, not at all. The idea of unconditional love is applicable to lovers who are now couples as well. For those who are now together with their lovers, this is what you should do: you must love your lover insanely, lavishly, without demanding any feedback. Even though your lover might wrong you, hurt you or disappoint you, love her/him anyway. Be utterly stubborn in your love. This may sound stupid. It really does. But perhaps, in the matter of the heart, one has to be foolish only to be wise.

In the beginning I wrote that men’s artistic endeavours have mostly been exercised in the field of love. Hence, it is the jurisdiction of artists to interpret love, not some TIME magazine psychologist contributors (which why they flunked the task).

Let us, therefore, take notes again from an artist and his novel.

The artist’s name is Graham Greene and the novel is “The End of the Affair” which has been made into a movie in 1999 starring Julianne More and Ralph Fiennes. (Both the novel and the Hollywood production movie were the works of witchcraft, breathtakingly magical; which had me caught believe that the cachet, the mark that a love is genuine is its unconditional nature.)

Set in World War II England, the novel told the story of a wife of a civil servant, Sarah Miles (More), who was involved in a passionate adulterous affair with Maurice (Fiennes), a novelist. One day, during the Blitzkrieg of London by German Luftwaffe, Maurice was fatally injured in his apartment and looked as if he were dead. Seeing the tragedy that befell her illegitimate lover, Sarah, although a life-long atheist got to her knees, prayed for a miracle to God and vowed that if God restore Maurice’s life, she would completely end “the affair”.

Suddenly, Maurice called her name from behind. He was alive.

Utterly appalled, Sarah slowly and silently walked out his apartment. As she took her leave, resolved to fulfil her vow of ending the affair, the following conversations took place:

Sarah: “Love doesn’t end just because we don’t see each other (read: be together).” 

Maurice: “Doesn’t it?”

Sarah: “People go on loving God, don’t they? All their lives, without seeing Him.”

Maurice: “That’s not my kind of love.”

Sarah: “Maybe there’s no other kind.”

From secular art, I would like to close this long soliloquy by sharing the main idea about love viewed from the perspective of sacred art; and the artist that is my source of inspiration is named Paul of Tarsus. In this freelance-writer’s opinion, the Apostle Paul is perhaps the only person in history, beside Christ, who has duly understood the meaning of love. He knew that love is not about description, formula or equation and that love cannot be explained, but it can only be practiced. Indeed, in Paul’s eyes, love is about taking action, the corollary of which is self-sacrifice.

To the congregation at the city of Corinth, an ancient city of prostitution in which the meaning of love has been reduced to mere sensuality, Paul wrote probably the truest words ever written about love:

“Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous; love is never boastful or conceited;

“It is never rude or selfish; it does not take offense, and is not resentful.

“Love takes no pleasure in other people’s sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.

“Love does not come to an end.” 

(I Corinthians 13: 4-8)

I dedicate this TO THE HAPPY FEW. TO WHOM LOVE SPEAKS.