A Framework for Love
“It's not love for the other. The other person becomes a vehicle, for my gratification. Too much of what is called love, is fish love. An external love is not on what I'm going to get but what I'm going to give.”
Abraham J. Twerski
I would like to say that I’ve been musing on love lately, but in actuality, I was just inspired to write this post from a YouTube video I watched by Abraham J. Twerski, an American rabbi. (I’ll link the video at the end of this post).
As a relationship coach, a woman who now believes Ryan Gosling is the epidemy of true love from being targetted by enough media outlets and a self-proclaimed relationship expert, ironically none of my relationships have worked out so maybe I’m just an imposter, I’ve made one observation. That our obsession with love as a species has blinded us from trying to understand it beyond a superficial level. And ironically enough the idea of having/keeping love is in many ways in direct contradiction to what I would even say love is supposed to be. Admittedly, love is very nuanced and both poets and scientists alike for centuries have been trying to understand its inner workings, but I do think Twerski is on to something.
Often times we correlate love with satisfied needs, and I’d argue that we sorely mix the two up. An example of this is that we often think if you don’t satisfy my needs we don’t really love each other or if you do satisfy my needs we do love each other. This is a simple example of modus ponens, and unfortunately the reality for many people, myself included. Like Twerski says, people, relationships become a vehicle for your own self-gratification. And I’d argue that unfortunately this isn’t solely limited to just romantic relationships.
It’s also important to note here that the needs that I am referring to aren’t as explicit as the four love languages, or sexual needs. Rather, I’m speaking specifically to those needs that we may think are ugly, or linger just below the surface of our consciousness. The need to be needed, the need to be desired, the need to control, the need to be loved. Deeper existential desires that are far more complex.
This is not to say that your needs aren’t important, but being aware that when we accidentally introduce consequentialism and more specifically, “the ends justifies the means” (the end being our needs and the means being love/relationships) to relationships/love it can be dangerous. I’d argue that it stems from a fault of the West where we have fallen into the illusion that the best way forward is to focus on the individual > community. Which then by extension grooms ourselves to become hedonists to a massive fault. Which moreover spills into our approach to love and romance, whether done consciously or unconsciously.
I assume that from the title you thought that perhaps I would give you a framework for love. The only frameworks I do truly follow is John 3:16 and 1 Corinthians 13:4-8. But even within those frameworks, there are many nuances that I do enjoy discussing and musing over. Which leaves me with two questions for you:
