Perceptions of love
A brief exploration of different ideas about love, marriage and romance
Humans have been thinking, talking and writing about love- romantic love, familial love (and these two types often overlapped much more than we modern humans care to remember) and platonic love - since time immemorial. The world’s oldest surviving love poem that we know of is written in a clay tablet from around 2000 BCE. Titled “Istanbul #2461” by archaeologists or “The Love Song for Shu-Sin” (translation here), it is thought to be part of an annual sacred marriage rite in which the King would symbolically marry Inanna, the ancient Sumerian goddess of love, sensuality, procreation (and war) - the duty of the ruler was to marry a priestess of Inanna and mate with her (and by extension, mate with the goddess Innana herself), and thereby ensure fertility and prosperity for the coming year.
Far from being a silly, frivolous emotion for teenage girls to indulge in or to be relegated to empty platitudes like “love is love” or some cheesy story in a Netflix chick flick, love is one of the most powerful driving forces known to us - men have been driven by it to build magnificent monuments to the object of their love even at the expense of their empire, to start wars, to kill other men (and sometimes, the very woman they supposedly love), and driven mad by it. For most of us, if we are lucky, the people we love will be the last thing we think about on our final seconds on Earth, and our relationships with them will define us in our death - if you walk around any graveyard, you will see the deceased marked as someone’s “beloved mother”, “beloved husband”, etc. I confess to being one of the apparently few people who did not adore Love Actually, but its opening scene describing the last phone calls of the victims of 9/11 is one of my favourite scenes. Embarrassingly, it still moves me to tears today.
The central Christian story upon which much of the Western world was built is premised on Jesus dying and suffering on the cross as a manifestation of God’s sacrificial love of humanity. While the Western world has become less Christian than ever before and so cannot comprehend this story in its literal sense, stories which are built on this archetype of sacrificial love are as enduring and popular as ever - most famously, of course, the unrelenting popularity of the Harry Potter series (one of my favourites!).
Love has its dark side of course - love of a country, ideology or a notion of God has also driven men to commit or ignore unspeakable atrocities, often playing on the victims’ love of their own families and children to terrorise them to their core. To love someone completely is to be forever vulnerable to the pain of deep betrayal or loss, and to be consumed by that fear.
Love doesn’t guarantee a happy ending, either. Stories of star-crossed lovers and the tragedy of unrealised love are amongst the most popular and enduring tales: from Romeo and Juliet who are so driven by love that they take their own lives rather than bear to love without the other, to Julia and Winston in George Orwell’s 1984 who thought they had found in each other the kind of love that could withstand the totalitarian Party. Spoiler alert (even though this book was published in 1949 - where have you been!?): they were wrong- the Party was, in the end, all too powerful, and their love for each other could not withstand their deepest fears. The lines “under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me” remains one of the most haunting ones I have ever read.
Love and marriage
Every human culture has created some way to navigate and constrain the forces of romantic love between men and women, and its obvious link to fertility and childrearing. For most of human history, and today across the world, love does not necessarily have anything to do with the person who will become your spouse and who you will have children with. You may have loved a man, but been betrothed to another in order to solidify power or seal a business deal. You may love a man who will be a wonderful partner, but be a terrible father to your children. You may love a woman for her beauty and wit, but find that she wants something totally different in life to you. If you are male, you may have married one woman with whom you raise children with, but also been able to marry another. You may have had obligations to your wife or wives, but you may not have loved her. Or, you may have loved your wife but still found sexual passion elsewhere. If you were female, you may have given in to pre-marital love and been hurriedly and quietly married off to prevent anyone knowing your sins, or if you were unlucky enough to marry Henry VIII, you may have failed to produce a male heir and found yourself swiftly beheaded on suspicion of adultery.
The love marriage
“First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage. [And then comes “happily ever after.”]
For most of us in the West today, this is all unthinkable. The vast majority of men and women in the modern West choose our own spouses - and expect to love them. Thank goodness. Today, those spouses can be of the same sex in many jurisdictions. You may have lived with them prior to marriage, you may in fact love someone and live with them forever without marrying them, or you may have children with them prior to marriage. You may decide to marry and later, fall out of love, and divorce each other.
In the “love marriage” story, like the children’s rhyme quoted above, you can expect to meet a boy or girl, go on a date, see if you like them, pursue dating if you do, and then fall in love. Once you fall in love, you will, of course, get married, and then you may have a family.
Love is taken as granted as one of the foundational reasons for marriage - you marry a person not just because you think you can build a good life with them, but because you love them. You expect the love to last a lifetime. You may also expect your partner to fulfil many needs that previously would have been split across different people - your best friend, your romantic interest, your support, your sexual and erotic fantasy, the mother / father of your children, your confidant, and so on. Love is an emotion to be felt, and if you break up in the end because you “fell out of love”, well, that’s too sad, but understandable - after all, what is a marriage without love? You may even marry someone and then meet the love of your life - and again, what are you supposed to do if this happens to you, except pursue your great love story and follow your path to the promised land of Happily Ever After?
At the risk of sounding like an unromantic psychopath, this perspective seemed strange to me when I first encountered it, because I grew up in a totally different culture in which the idea of “love” is not synonymous with “marriage” in the same way - I grew up in an “arranged marriage” culture.
The arranged marriage
“First comes respect for each other’s roles, then comes friendship, and then comes love.”
Despite the prevalence of Bollywood movies featuring insanely cheesy and dramatic professions of love, in many “arranged marriage” cultures, you may not even know or love the person you marry straight away. The entire sequence of events is flipped on its head: you don’t meet, fall in love, and then marry; you meet with the intention of marriage, you select each other (this is what distinguishes it from a forced marriage) based on the compatibility of your goals, virtues and vices, and marry. Only after marriage do you get to know each other, and then, if you are very lucky, you will build a close friendship based on the shared endeavour of building a life and a family together. If you are then even luckier still, you will fall in love with each other.
The arranged marriage sees the commitment of marriage as preceding, and becoming the basis for, love. The love marriage sees love as preceding, and being the basis for, commitment.
In the arranged marriage culture, you may never have heard your parents say “I love you” to one another - I never have. The declaration of love is neither here nor there - rather, the love is enacted in commitment to your spouse and children. For this reason, when finding my own partner in life, the words “I love you” were a little baffling to me at the beginning - I wasn’t quite sure what to even do with them and couldn’t really understand what they meant. For me, the more pertinent questions were: “Will you switch off my life support machine if I become terminally ill?” and “Will you be there if I get cancer?”. In fact, I once told a supervisor of mine that to me, love meant the man who will care for me and switch off my life support machine if I became terminally ill (and vice versa), and she absolutely howled with laughter. 10 years later, she still brings up this anecdote and tells me I should ask Hallmark to put that on its Valentine’s Day and anniversary cards.
And to this day, I don’t really understand the joke, if I’m honest(!). To me, if my Mr stays with me throughout my life, cares for me when I am sick, and switches off my life support machine (so, putting the alleviation of my pain and suffering potentially above his desire to hold out for more years together), this is surely an expression of lifelong commitment, devotion, and placing my interests first when it matters: Is this not a type of enduring love? What can be more romantic than that type of commitment and dedication? (To this question, the supervisor answered: “I don’t know, why don’t you try walking into an Anne Summers and going away on a trip for two, and then ask him if he feels that is more romantic?”). I mean, she had a point!
Don't worry, he's just as (un)romantic. When people ask him what he most loves about me, he says: “I can negotiate with her.” Charming. Stick that in your love poem.
Love as an action
I’m happy to report that over the years, I have indeed become more acquainted with those more emotional, romantic feelings of love and the daily declarations of “ I love you”, the beautiful love songs and cheesy poems, etc. I enjoy the dinners out at beautiful restaurants, the holding hands, the date nights, the in-jokes, the pet names, the cheesy stuff, and all those little rituals of romance that I once rolled my eyes at.
However, fundamentally, I think of love as an action, and not as an emotion - and I must perform this action whether I feel the emotion or not. Sure, when you feel the emotion of love and enact it, that is just total bliss. To cook a meal for the Mr, or to care for him when he is sick, and to feel the strong waves of romance and love at the same time is sublime. However, just as important is to reinforce the commitment and act out the daily rituals of love even when I don’t feel “in love” in the moment - love is in the act of him making me a hot water bottle every night in the winter, and a cup of tea when I am stressed up to my eyeballs at my desk.
When friends of mine who are considering marrying their partners ask me how I knew “he was the one”, I never really know what to say. I didn’t know he was “the one” so much as I committed to becoming the one for him, and to him becoming the one for me, and to building up a life together on that basis. Of course, no one knows what will happen - either of us may be hit by a bus, wake up one morning with a tumour, or, God forbid, fall in love with someone else 20 more years down the line. But, part of my commitment to him is to ensure I never put myself in a position to fall for anyone else: To the best of my control, I do not enter into situations in which I could be tempted to betray our commitment, and this involves heavily regulating my platonic male relationships with colleagues, friends, etc.
Interestingly, I once had a conversation with a Catholic friend after he had just gotten married, and his eyes lit up at my description of love as an action and a commitment, not an emotion. He describes his belief in God and Jesus in the same way - to him, belief is not an emotional state but an enacted relationship with God, expressed through rituals of prayer, Church attendance, etc. He must go through the rituals, even and especially during the times he does not feel them.
The capstone marriage vs the cornerstone marriage
Another big divide in perspectives of marriage is whether your marriage should be the “cornerstone” of your life together, or a “capstone” once you have achieved all the other important things in your life, a cherry on top.
Modern Western wisdom dictates that to be a responsible partner, you must first have all your ducks in a row - complete your education, enter your profession, build your identity. Then, find someone who fits into your life and makes it even better. You will have achieved your own identity, built your own success, and know yourself a little better. In other words, your marriage with another person will be the capstone of an otherwise already successful, put together life.
On the other hand, while it’s changing a little now, in conventional arranged marriage cultures, marriage is seen as the foundation of a life that you build together, and it is best to enter into it before you form your own rigid identity or lifestyle. You can then build up your own joint life together. Marrying younger is therefore encouraged (the aunties will be on your case by your 20s!!). In other words, your marriage will be the cornerstone of the rest of your life.
I’m not sure which will be best for most people. There will be some people who will benefit from the additional years of experience and / or maturity, before making a big commitment to each other. Others may benefit from finding a partner in their life while young, and embarking on the messy project of building themselves up together. You may not know yourself by then, but then again, you may change as you get older and need to learn to grow together anyway.
Many people also will be extremely glad that they did not settle down with their first ever partner. The “love marriage” story may involve several break ups or learning to navigate the messy world of the opposite sex before deciding to commit to a more suitable, mature partner. However, which way around does the cause and effect go here - if you see dating as experimental and for the purposes of finding love, then it makes sense that you may need to go through a series of breakups first. However, if you had a different expectation of a partner from the get-go and envisioned building a life with someone earlier on, you may well have chosen to wait a while longer or have had some family help in selecting a partner, or be looking for different qualities. It occurred to me when I was helping a friend through a breakup that I didn’t even know the world “break up” in my own mother tongue because it wasn’t a concept my parents had ever encountered.
I don’t know what will work for most people, but what I will say for myself is I had assumed settling down with someone before I had my ducks in a row professionally may have been a distraction or have set me back in that realm. However, I found completely the opposite: Having a partner support me through the education and early career stage has been one of the most unexpected and most powerful privileges I have ever experienced, and I’m incredibly grateful for it.
To be clear, I know good arranged marriages in which the spouses roar with laughter and are close friends, and absolutely terrible arranged marriages in which there is a lot of abuse, compounded by the stigma of divorce. I know amazing love marriages in which the couple have stayed together for many decades, and others which were a disaster. I also know of forced marriages which almost always are a total disaster and shouldn’t be tolerated, and I know of many casual, short term “situationships” in which everyone involved seems miserable. Humans are messy and complicated, so I would not seek to prescribe my preferences for anyone else.
I am just grateful and glad to live in a world in which I could pick my own partner, and not be ordered to be beheaded by him for failing to provide a son. I’m incredibly grateful to live in one of the most free societies to ever have existed, and also to have benefited from a more traditional perspective on love as we seem to have cobbled up something in between: the commitment and the companionship, the duty and the romance.
If you live in the West and are not from a minority culture / religion, it is highly likely that you, too, will be able to pick your own partner, unlike so many people before us and so many across the world. The choice you make will be amongst the most consequential decisions in your life (as explored by Lionel Shriver in her wonderful book, The Post-Birthday World), yet no one ever talks about how to choose, and then how to build from that choice - this is talked about way less than how to pick a career or a city to live in. Some religious communities seem to have an advantage in this respect, as the soon-to-be bride and groom are often counselled over what to ask each other, what to expect from each other, etc. My own family gave me a whole list of questions to ask of the other, to ensure our views on the life we were about to embark upon together were compatible. This then gives you a template on how to continue those conversations long into the future, as you navigate and negotiate new challenges. Of course, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs, so the communal aspect can also come with other challenges.
Choose wisely, choose well - and then: good luck, and enjoy!
Love this. You have a different flavour of romanticism 😉
There's a quote that came to my mind while reading this, can't recall who said it, but it goes like this: "vulnerability is the glue that holds a relationship together."
I can't help but think this old wisdom has been forgotten often in modern day relationships.