Bucket definition… The Three Faces of Love

Why is it the worst of life’s disasters always seem to have Love embedded in them somewhere near the middle?  I mean really, what’s going on with this?    Whatever it is its been going on for a long, long time and no one (not that I’ve ever heard of) has ever made much headway at putting a believable reason to the situation. Love is the positive, the good, Love is what makes it worthwhile, to live in a state of Love what everyone wants, what everyone is trying to achieve, right? 

Right, of course.  And yet everyone also knows that when Love is in the picture is when risk is at its’ greatest, when things get the most disoriented and confusing, when it’s so terribly easy to get lost or worse end up suffering exactly what you didn’t want exactly where you didn’t want to be. Something just isn’t right about this picture.  Ironic, isn’t it? That Love (or perhaps say more properly failures in the realms of Love)  resolve out as such a prime source of so much bitter cynicism?  Sure seems that way to me.

This particular conundrum is quite a set of contradictions, and yet by observation undeniable fact.  As a philosopher such things are among my most fascinating challenges.  How can this be?  I know it is, but how did it happen?  What makes it tick?  This one has been simmering back burner for a very long time.  It’s time to take a swing at it, and with your permission that’s exactly what I propose to do.

Let me begin by saying that contrary to the title of this post Love cannot be carried in a bucket.  Oh, I suppose you could collect a bucketful of the various hormones that trigger the libido, the instincts of mating and procreation, but contrary to the opinions offered by those of the bio-chem persuasion (who will assert that all of life is nothing more than complex chemical interactions completely beyond the rational, and therefore totally beyond any degree of personal responsibility) such urges and altered states of mind are not Love, not at all.  Such concoctions might make a run at explaining libido and the socially mandated arrangements of lifestyle that support the libido, but not Love.  Love exists in realms even more complex than the chemistries, and less understood.

Please keep in mind this post is an exploration of the functionality of Love, quite a different subject found a very long ways away from the experience of Love.  The experience of Love is what poetry is for, and this is most definitely not poetry.  Having said that allow me to assert that understanding the how’s and why’s of how Love actually impacts on a life is to understand not one thing, one state of being, but rather to understand a set and system of interdependent and constantly evolving emotional force vectors ultimately orienting each individual’s Sphere of Empathy with regard to any other such sphere.

Say what?!??   Just what kind of  digiderp nonsense bred off to psychobabble bullshit are you tryin’ to blow around here?  Evolving emotional force vectors? C’mon dude, are you sober enough to be running a keyboard?  Get real or go home.

I am being real, and I’ll be the first to admit that really is a pretty chewy thought.  Took a while to get it squeezed down into just forty some words.  It started out about four hundred words that didn’t even make sense to me and I was the one wrote it.  That’s ten to one at a best effort, four hundred down to forty, but consider how those forty words and all they imply are normally represented to English speaking folks by only one word: Love.

Many languages of the world are home to multiple words describing what, in English, would be described as forms or facets of Love, the nuances between them giving an understanding of the described condition’s function within a life. But not so English, in English there is only Love that is then associated to modifiers as if Love is always the same thing that may be found wearing a variety of different paint jobs.  Sorry, but that’s not right. Please excuse me for saying so but having spent a lifetime watching people fall in out and through love the only viable conclusion is the idea of Love as one singular thing has to be just dead ass wrong, the observable facts simply do not support such an idea.

Love (considered as a mechanism) resolves out as at least three, possibly more but at least three, force vectors of a distinct and discrete emotional nature continuously impacting the orientation and direction of a life the polarity of the  relationship between any two individuals. As I’ve investigated these systems I’ve come to describe these forces into my thoughts in the following manner: the infantile,  the romantic and the mature. 

Why do I describe the active components of Love as force vectors rather than say overlapping states of being?  A very good question, a key question actually.  Allow me to take a fast lap around Robin Hood’s barn here and explain myself as we go.

Vectors come from mathematical thought concerning two rays originating from the same point. Geometry gives that two rays from a common point must define an angle, if there was no angle they would be the same ray. Rays become vectors when the length of two (or more) ray segment(s) are specified some finite length to represent a degree of force impacting on the originating point in some manner proportionate to the angle between.  A most useful concept in physics and engineering, and surprisingly useful in describing how emotion is represented into both the inner and outer realities as well.

Am I saying the most complex of human relations are nothing more than vector math, awarding the brass ring to the mathematicians rather than the chemists?  No, of course not.  But just as the chemists’ thought is valid within the context of an organism’s responses to various emotional states mathematics is the only form of thought able to provide a workable real time visualization for the interactions of those various and vague emotional forces as they influence the human condition.  I describe the mechanism of Love in such terms as a way to visualize the way those forces impact on a life, each a force of expectation or intent shifting perception and behavior in a predictable direction, the sum impact of such forces producing the changes observed in lives to the influence of Love.  As is so often the case I’m recruiting math to describe things wherein math in and of itself has no real existence, a convenience for the sake of communication rather than justification or rationalization of cause.

Ok, back where we started. Three forces, each of which manifests in a consistent direction, operating within a multi-dimensional environment.  If this were an essay on say celestial  navigation as it might apply to faster than light spaceships you might expect these to be defined in relation to something conveniently large, say perhaps your home galaxy.  Set one as thrust along a line parallel to a line running from your home star to the center of the galaxy, another parallel to a line passing through the galactic center perpendicular to your home planet’s plane of rotation, the third perpendicular to the plane defined by the first two.  Arbitrarily assign a point in the center of your galaxy as representing the origin and guess what, once you’ve established a unit of distance you have a set of co-ordinates to define the location of the planet of beautiful women who figured out space flight before the idea of clothes dawned on them. Or something like that.

But this is not an essay on celestial navigation, the environment in question is a great deal  more… transitory… than finding your way around a relatively permanent fixture like a  galaxy.  The environment under examination is more subjective, subtle, unstable, in point of fact it is the state space of the human condition where for all intents and purposes each and every human being actually compares quite nicely to a galaxy.  Still though the idea of a co-ordinate system makes a good entrance to examine the mechanism of Love.  If nothing else it allows one to mark a beginning point from which to navigate.    Consider the one point everyone has in common, the closest thing to a universal zero-zero as is possible to define.  

Everyone begins life as an utterly helpless infant totally dependent on momma for simple survival.  There is little doubt our first awareness occurs before birth when momma is for all intents and purposes the entire universe and the purpose of the universe is to provide for us.  Everyone’s first experience with Love is a one way relationship of nurture received,  there is nothing to understanding this.   The motives of those who provide that nurture are decades away from being understood, to the little one Love and Nurture Received are one and the same thing. Love is that which provides what is needed but beyond personal ability to procure. Love is the MotherSource (however it might be that you perceive her), to love the source of nurture equated to loving you own life, part and parcel of the survival instinct.  

This then what I call Infantile Love, set into words it translates as I love you because you take care of me.

For a lot of people this is as far into understanding Love as they ever get.  Love is what gets me what I need, be it a kind word and a soft shoulder or a kick in the pants when I’m being dumb or the kind of sex that lights up the sky to the point I don’t need to brag because what the whale, after a light show like that everyone already knows anyway.

It’s equally true that same lot of people tend to spend a great deal of their lives terribly frustrated and bitterly disappointed.  If only there was enough Love in the world  they wail, if only there was enough Love then everyone would have everything they need and everyone would be happy.  Of course this is as far as they take the thought, as far as they’re capable of taking the thought.  An emotional infant (of whatever calendar age!) really has no idea, none, of the effort and complexities required to provide it the nurture it demands.  No surprises there, to fail understanding Love beyond the infantile is to refuse any concept beyond the boundaries of one’s own life.

The most passing touch of causal logic will reveal the obvious: someone has to provide what some other will consume.  Such nurture is not free, even if only nurture of the emotional quite devoid of anything physical there is still a flow of energy involved.  Like all continuous flows of energy Love must be a full circuit phenomenon to continue functioning. In some manner there must be a balance of energy transferred if Love is to be a continuous presence.

It really doesn’t matter if you were born a puppy dog or a kitty cat or a human being, the facts of the matter are that momma is only going to carry you just so far before weaning you away to be on your own.  Fact of life: infantile love will not because it cannot go the distance, not for anyone.  I’m convinced humanities’ efforts to accommodate this fact of life, for fact it is, impacts to greater or lesser degree on every facet of the human condition.

Just because the Love we knew as an infant can’t go the distance does not mean that we can go the distance without Love, it doesn’t mean that we should try to go the distance without Love.  For all the disenchantment with the subject it’s still true that Love in some form or fashion is an absolutely critical component in supporting life.  The question of course revolves around just exactly what form or fashion is best suited to any given stage or state of life?

Fifty some years ago Free Love was the rallying cry of a generation in rebellion against what they didn’t understand.  But Love isn’t free, we just established that.  One way or another the Love we receive must be returned in kind, it must be, and not just to establish justice and parity for the those who provided us Love but for ourselves as well.  Why?  Because learning how to provide Love is just as critical a part of growing up, of achieving our ultimate maturity, as is learning how to earn a livelihood.

When an individual becomes trapped in an understanding of Love limited to the infantile it’s very common to find that same individual an emotionally compromised person struggling with any number of life’s other loadings.  Seriously, it’s really hard to navigate when you only have voluntary thrust in one direction, towards Momma or towards whoever or whatever has been declared MOM (Mother of the Moment).  You end up in all kinds of convoluted kinky and downright dangerous destructive places when you have to reassign something as Momma (with all the attendant baggage that can leave hanging!) just because it resides in the general direction you want to go no matter how little genuine nurture that thing, whatever it might be, has to offer. 

Again, a touch of logic.  Since everyone starts out an infant it then follows that at some point anyone who enlarged their understanding of Love beyond the infantile had to have passed through a period when the universe opened out for them, experienced some aperture epiphany.  Science fiction movies are full of spectacular visual special effects to symbolize such transitions, first to my mind Dave Bowman’s passage of the monolith on his way to becoming a Star Child in the Kubrick/Clarke masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yea, I’m talking about one of those times when almost everything suddenly changes perspective.

What is found on the far side of that transition?  What is found is a universe exponentially enlarged into a bewildering range of options, choices, possibilities.  What is found is the unbounded universe of Romantic Love: the most partially understood concept I’ve ever found. Romantic Love is the precursor to Mature Love, it is the love of a dream, it’s the Love people fall in and out of, what the musicians write the songs about.  It is also the most versatile form of Love, for romantic love may be applied to anyone (or anything) and often is.

Romantic Love.  To translate Romantic Love into words is to say “I love you because you  fit my dream.”  With the onset of Romantic Love the abstractions of imagination enter the picture.  Romantic Love is love focused on an imagining whose translation into reality will define some future state of being.  What future state of being?  Most usually “…and they lived happily ever after.”

Sadly though the mechanisms of Romantic Love are the prime culprit in the miseries and misfortunes associated to Love.  The basic nature of Romantic Love all but guarantees this. How could it not?  Since Romantic love is actually the love of a dream (when the focus of the love is between two humans hopefully a shared dream) and how many dreams can actually become reality? How many shared dreams remain the same feasible dream for long enough to bring them stable and enduring within reality?  Not that many, not really, certainly not in their original form when the elements of the dream are usually substitutions intended, known or not, to reprise and replace the unlimited nurture and support from the MotherSource of Infantile Love.  Just because Romantic Love has exploded onto the stage of life does not mean there is sufficient maturity in any of the players involved to actually bring such a dream to reality. 

Equally troublesome for the human race is the fact Romantic Love is an absolute master at the art of camouflage and misdirection, totally proficient at inspiring the substitution of any number of inanimate objects or social arrangements into the role of the MotherSource, sublimated into those roles as the psychologists might say.  Many and a many fall prey to the never examined but absolute belief that the unlimited nurture they enjoyed as an infant will be reinstated once they’ve gotten the ring or won the big ball game, once they’ve conquered the business world or found the perfect shade of eyeliner for enjoying tantric sex.  Needless to say the commercial interests of the world would be far better qualified than I to speak to this sad syndrome, they’ve made it their business for a long time now to encourage such thoughts, it’s a large part of how the commercial dreamweavers, the advertisers, craft offerings that hold a massive number of human beings enslaved to the ultimate sterility of materialism.

While materialism and all associated are indeed a huge source of unhappiness it is not commonly assigned as a failure of love, not that many actually understand that it is even a form of Romantic Love and so I’ll not be speaking in depth to that particular deformation.  It is a huge, huge subject far beyond the scope of this essay which is focused on the personal and interpersonal function of Love. 

As in so many things Romantic Love must be considered against the appropriate timeline, analyzed within it’s own environment, it really can’t be reduced to a static cross section taken from the lives of those involved.  Love is after all a flow of energy imparting a force onto on lives, and like all forces time is part of the equation.  If the force Love exerts on a life were to be defined in the same manner as mass and momentum for example we could say “this much deflection in life trajectory observed across this amount of time is what we will now and forever after refer to as one Alex of LoveForce”  (those who know my story feel free to laugh, but c’mon, I had to pick a name).  Someday perhaps such a definition will be a feasible thing, but for now let it stand that such a definition for the forces involved are a possible thing.

So why would we want such a measurement in the first place?  There are several good reasons.  Romantic love is a thrust in the direction of a dream, something yet to become real be that something some relationship of mutual nurture proven trustworthy or some accomplishment in the material realms substituted for that nurture.  To understand just how much effective force each is imparting into a life is a very good thing to know, particularly when it is impacting on yourself or someone you hold in your sphere of empathy.

Another factoid to hold in focus: Romantic Love is not a one at a time kind of thing, it is anything but monogamous, most folks will feel thrust from more than one at any given point in time.  Some are dreams of their own construction, others will be provided to them, or perhaps inflicted upon them, by culture and society.  Still though, almost everyone is host and home to several romantic loves proceeding concurrently.

It is the multiplicity of romantic love that demands Love be visualized as force vectors, for there is absolutely nothing guarantees the thrust from the love of these various dreams point in anything resembling the same direction.  Where most folks are home to some number of romantic loves it is equally true these are generally of such widely diverse focus the thrusts involved cancel out leaving the original trajectory of life little changed.  When you do the math it becomes obvious why the multiplicity of romantic love is the status quo’s best friend.

How could that be true?  If people carry many romantic loves and each love carried produces  thrust in some unique direction how likely is it the thrust from those loves would exactly  cancel out leaving nothing to produce motion?  How often will such a multitude of forces impacting on the same point achieve a net sum of zero?  Not very often, certainly not by accident.  True enough, but as life progresses there are other forces that come into play, perhaps the largest of which is Mature Love, the most overlooked face of love.

Mature Love exists beyond the infantile expectation of the universe providing nurture without effort, beyond the dreams of Romantic love where the universe complies with such a  demand.  Mature love evolves from the environments and experience created in the effort of romantic love achieved.  Just as reality is the inverse of fantasy Mature love is the inverse of Romantic love, the inevitable and most necessary equal and opposite force.

Mature love is a key and critical component in the ability to harvest the satisfactions of life and then processes those into soul sustenance, mature love is the love associated with compassion and compersion in many realms… physical or spiritual or emotional.  To set Mature Love into words might be best expressed by saying “I love (you) because in all the ways that matter (you) are and have been for so long now the source of the satisfaction that makes life worthwhile.  Thank you so much.”

The fact Mature Love is derived from needs genuinely satisfied from within the self causes it to behave much like another force found in the physical universe, it behaves much like a gravity well compared to the imaginings of romantic love (to stay with the spacefaring analogy).  Mature love is a force of continuity and security that must be overcome by some thrust of equal or larger magnitude before much actually changes. Many and a many a romantic love has barely enough thrust to maintain orbit, if even that much,  around some happiness deepening with the years.  Why dream of something different when reality is already meeting that need, that desire? Many simply burn in to become a soft memory recalled at odd times.

Am I saying that mature love once achieved is a thing set in stone for all time?  No, of course not.  Times change, circumstances change, entropy takes its’ toll.  What was once a huge source of satisfaction and sustenance can wither and atrophy, become a burdensome thing in all truth.  Mature love is still a plastic thing that evolves with the fortunes of life, I call it mature because it sets itself the servant of life rather than life’s master.

Step back now, make sure you’re in a safe place and let your focus go soft, let your imagination paint a diorama of life before your eyes.  Look and see the lives around you as bright spots that are in motion, see the forces that shape the trajectories.  Can you do this? Can you see the face of the mother, she who began our definition of love?  Can you see the comet like tails of romantic love generated as the life turns and shifts to position the mother face in some desired perspective?  Those glowing tracers from the dreams that paint the face of the friend, the lover, the mate who will take the mother's place and accompany that life on its’ way?  Can you see how as time passes and the life progresses in its’ journey those faces begin to shift and transpose, mutate and morph into the face of God?  When you can see that then you can truly see the three faces of Love.

==originally published 10/12/15====