Note: This is a modified version of an essay I wrote for ENGL0150E Love & Friendship.
Love is the greatest source of joy for some, but permanently cripples the hearts of others. Love can enlighten us with an altruistic selflessness, but also be the clearest reflection of our selfish desires. If it is so simultaneously hypocritical and convoluted, then what is love?
For present purposes, the term “love” will be interchangeable with the “Eros” C.S. Lewis depicts in Four Loves: the complex state of being in romantic love. An enamoration that innocently begins as a “delighted preoccupation” with a romantic interest, Eros is painted by Lewis as a vehicle for appreciation and desire for “the one”. He asserts that the presence of Eros, or lack thereof, is often the main distinction between our selfish physical cravings, Venus, and an actual desire to know our beloved. But while this is generally recognized as a positive characteristic, Lewis warns of subconsciously idolizing the concept of Eros in our lives. Lewis argues that ultimately, taking Eros too seriously will inevitably destroy us as we glorify it and propel it into a role that only God can fill. These sentiments are qualified in Alice Munro’s short story “Differently”, which exemplifies how while love can destroy us, it is often due to human nature’s persistent pursuit of passion stemming from discontent and relative desensitization, not the concept of Eros itself.
According to the concept of closure from Gestalt’s Principles of Design, we instinctively fill in the missing parts of designs to abstract a whole image out of a few fragmented parts. Similarly, Munro utilizes the juxtaposition between the expectations stemming from Maya and Georgia’s circumstances and their actual actions to develop a “closure-esque” rhetoric that pushes the reader to fill in the gaps and assume what their motivations were. In the story, both Maya and Georgia are in relationships— Maya with Raymond, and Georgia with Ben— that appear to be stable by all physical, tangible measurements: Maya is a rich heiress, never lacking in luxuries, married to an obstetrician and gynecologist in Raymond who shows some level of affection for her; Georgia also lives sufficiently with Ben, who is a Navy Officer and cares dearly for her. But despite their seemingly secure circumstances, both Georgia and Maya have affairs with people that neither care for them nor have any benefits to offer them.
In describing Maya’s infidelity, Munro writes that “[Maya] kept on seeing Harvey. She would relate, at lunch, some very disillusioning facts about him, then announce that she had to go, she was meeting him” (71). Not only was Maya cheating on her spouse, she was doing so with a man that she did not even like, let alone love. As such, if Maya was not driven to pursue external relationships because of affection, then her concept of love must not have been an “Eros” built on an obsession and passion for her partners that Lewis would assume, but rather one derived from her own desires. Ultimately, the reader is presented with the uncomfortable idea that perhaps what drives humans to pursue love is not a unique, mystical power that moves us to a lover-centric passion, but rather just a desire for passionate adventure— a break from the tediousness of reality.
This concept of glorifying and pursuing excitement is also represented in what Maya calls her “true and desperate” love: “[Maya] had run away with, or to, a musician… She traveled with him for five weeks, and he deserted her in a hotel in Cincinnati. She then developed frightful chest pains, appropriate to a breaking heart. What she really had was a gallbladder attack” (72). Munro humorously ironizes Maya’s situation, effectively revealing her naivety of expecting intense emotions and a radicalized life from love. Munro also applies this message to the reader by indirectly posing the question: is a boring love a false one? Many people often portray love as a steamy, passionate entanglement that forces lovers to choose between stability or their love, but why must sacrificing our livelihoods for someone be the measuring stick to having “true love”? Through the experiences of Maya, Munro responds that perhaps tediousness and stagnancy in love is not a perilous error, but rather a step in the right direction. Apathy is a luxury. If we can afford to feel apathy in a relationship, then that must mean that there are no significant problems in it, and while that may not be the most thrilling form of love, it is not wrong by any means.
Along with arguing that approaching love from a more logical base is not wrong, Munro also delineates the dangers of loving purely for passion through Georgia’s restless conscience. As Georgia walks through her old neighborhood, she is faced with the guilt of her past actions in cheating on Ben and leaving him: “everywhere her footsteps reproached her, saying what-for, what-for, what-for” (62). Through the use of repetition and personification, Munro shows the severity of Georgia’s self-inflicted emotional burden resulting from her decision to have an affair and fragment her marriage. Georgia’s guilt persistently pangs her with the wistful dreams of what could have been if she didn’t throw away what she had. This idea that chasing a passionate love causes harm reflects Lewis’s assertion that glorifying the concept of Eros itself turns love into a false idol that endangers or ruins marriages. When Eros betrays our expectations, we often pin the blame on our partners, but usually the underlying problem is that from the very beginning, love was never capable of fulfilling those expectations. Georgia justified that because she had the affair, she must have never been in true love during her marriage, when perhaps Georgia simply could never accept that what she felt with Ben was a genuine love, just not a radically passionate one.
The issue with both Lewis and Munro’s perspectives is that love is too circumstantially influenced to be held to any one truth: all perceptions of love are uniquely influenced by a diverse array of factors like cultural and religious values, personal beliefs, and past experiences. To decry passion is to deny a core component of human nature. Considering how Lewis’s religious background affects his stance on Eros, his call to action holds for spiritually concerned Christians, but can lack urgency and purpose for those who do not already share those religious views. And as for Munro, she provides no superior solution to passion. If Maya and Georgia never had affairs, would they have truly been any more content with their lives? To not act on a passionate desire is to also leave room for persistent plaguing “what-ifs”, so if there is no clear fulfilling alternative, then the conundrum of how to act on love will remain the same.
To me, a perfect “Eros” is a self-destructive one. Although this stance may seem nonsensical and counterintuitive, I would argue that this is a widely accepted view that usually isn’t recognized because we tend to subconsciously categorize all forms of love into one basket. In its purest, most beautiful state, romantic love is fully passionate and exhilarating, but also fleeting because a successful Eros will rapidly transition into a more familiar, satisfied love. We often notice this trend in aging married couples: as they grow older together, they may still love each other, but in a more mellow, unconditional type of way that forms a stronger bond than the passionate love they previously had. In this scenario, an ebbing passion in the relationship actually strengthened it, because while passion is judgmental and will resent all change, a satisfied, familiar love is much more forgiving and can adapt with those involved with it.
In a way, this form of love can also fulfill Lewis and Munro’s beliefs. For Lewis, this love doesn’t cause people to glorify their love or a beloved one: it allows them to happily accept the relationship for all its faults because their contentment need not be dependent on the partner at all. From Lewis’s Christian perspective, no one on Earth would satisfy us: just as a broken jar would never be able to fill completely, we, as imperfect sinful beings, cannot fulfill each other’s needs, so this type of love would be obtained solely through a relationship with the one perfect God that can perfectly satisfy our desires. For Munro, people in this type of love aren’t necessarily passionate—they have no desire to be because they have already been fully satisfied. When we pursue adventure in our relationships, it is often because we are still emotionally immature and have not reached a point of understanding fulfillment in our lives yet. But with this type of love, the burden of satisfaction would not need to be on our romantic partner, but on ourselves. The moment we fully love ourselves to the extent where it is satisfying enough to simply live, we will have the ability to be content with our romantic relationships as well.
But whether my perspective is valid or not, ultimately, it doesn’t really matter. We will never know what love truly is because the closer we approach its definition, the less we will care about finding it. There is no equation that we can follow to love, so maybe we shouldn’t spend so much time looking for one and instead choose to derive our own. For while a personalized equation may be erroneous tens or hundreds or even thousands of times, none of that matters— it only needs to be correct once.