The word love has a long and layered etymological history, which I encourage you to get started discovering for yourself.
“Love” has lots of connotations in English – among them are affection, fondness, friendship, comradeship, selflessness, exhilaration, elation, narcissism, and of course, romance.
And, of course, Valentine’s Day is the go-to celebration for all things Cupid, or Eros, or whichever cherub happens to be your persuasion. After all, love just may be the most important quality we share… even if things these days seem to have two-stepped a little closer to Hallmark than to holiday. Still though… any excuse to party, and all. Keep those bars and nightclubs full.
There might be an ironic reference to be had here about the two “al”s – alcohol and Al Capone. There are also more sobering references to be had here about the kind of culture that we seem to value. But I digress.
You can find lots of explanations for the observance of Valentine’s Day – maybe as many as the types of love – although they don’t all seem nearly as sweet as a box of chocolates or a heart-shaped cut-out. But hey, being human means being rhetorical, 
and The Rhetorical WHY is nothing if not sentimental, so…
Just for you, St. Valentine, a meditation on love.
On Love
The foundation of love is lasting friendship, which itself has as cornerstones trust and respect. First, take the Golden Rule as a straightforward way to understand respect, and second, we trust that the person we love will treat us respectfully, under all circumstances. Without trust and respect, relationships can’t properly recover or grow more healthy from struggles that inevitably arise. A good thing about trust and respect: they tend to reinforce each other with time and familiarity, cementing what’s good, growing impervious to what’s not. Another good thing: they can go missing, then be rediscovered later, and still be influential; it’s never too late to repair and grow relationships, as long as both people are willing. And if you had them before, you know what it looks like, for later. Clearly, there’s more to being friends, but the basis of trust and respect is essential. Without it, there will never be real or lasting love.
Love enables you to forgive without strings, without second-thoughts, unconditionally… or maybe it’s better to say that love is “how we forgive without strings.” Love makes you willing to forgive because, in the greater scope, you’d rather save and build and love the person who’s important to you than risk having things with them suffer or waste away. Not to say that people don’t get angry or have trouble forgiving; we do, nobody’s perfect, so this is the “how” thing from above: say you’re angry with the person you love, yet you find a way to forgive them because you love them, and you see that what’s long-term matters more than whatever happened just now. In life, any fight or dispute requires somebody to break the impasse and offer peace, and I think the point to take here for relationships is that love propagates that ability, that strength to step up and forgive, to let go of ill feelings. From the one side, avoid grudges and guilt-trips (and maybe even take one on the chin, whether you think you deserve it or not). From the other side, don’t suspect grudges and guilt (and don’t throw one carelessly to the chin). All of which takes you back to trust and respect, mutual trust and respect. With that said, forgiveness does not mean being weak and letting someone walk all over you – being humble is not being weak, and in that sense, forgiveness requires confidence and strength-of-self. But here, too, the person you love aids your confidence because you are comfortable being honest with them, being yourself with them, as they are with you, whether things are blissful, or stressful, or anywhere in between.
Love provides the encouragement to resolve something that’s wrong – a fight or whatever – because what’s so good ultimately just outweighs whatever’s bad. It’s what is meant when people say relationships take effort or work: you can be upset, even hugely upset, with someone you love. (Sometimes love is why they upset you the most!) Yet you find a way through; somehow, you want to. You’re willing to struggle through the issue because you know your relationship is worth fighting for, not against, the person you love and everything that you are together. It’s desirable work, not laborious work, and at later times, you might even find that you crave the collaboration, the synergy, that accompanies the facing of challenges. You grow to trust it and rely on it because it works. As a pair, you work.
Love also encourages two people to share equal voice on matters… important matters, and not-so-important, too… no sense of competition even enters. It becomes not a question of one or the other having to say, “Listen!” or “Give me a chance”; the equality is natural, and the first person just wouldn’t move forward without having heard from the second, just wouldn’t, as a matter of respect, until they’d heard from the other, trusting that both must speak in order to make valuable contributions that help everyone.
Love helps you to be patient. Maybe the person you love needs to learn or discover something in their own time. Maybe you want to say something, but it would be premature before the full context is there for complete understanding. Or maybe you just need time to keep a nice secret or plan a surprise. Patience can be a hard thing because it always involves curbing your own interests in favour of the person you love.
Love enables tolerance. The person you love might need a chance to vent, and even if it’s unpleasant to listen, they still might need the chance. Or say one person enjoys something that the other doesn’t… but whether you participate or they go it alone, you still put up with it, for their sake (as long as it’s not destructive or harmful), because you know it makes them happy, and you want them to be happy because you love them.
Love will require sacrifice. Sometimes loving somebody means behaving in the opposite way, doing the opposite to what you want or even need. This may be because the person you love asks you to sacrifice. Or the person you love may not understand why you sacrifice and resent you for it. You can see, then, where sacrifice, tolerance, and patience connect when it comes to love. Time can clear things up, but not always, or else not in enough time for things to get better between you before they got worse. But that’s not to say love is lost. But it will take the trust and respect of the original friendship to take on the work of recovery, which is what makes being friends beforehand so much more valuable. So you can see where friendship and forgiveness connect when it comes to love, too. Sacrifice involves so many aspects of love and thus is maybe the harshest test for true love to endure, but if it is true love, it will endure.
“… the real current of what love is [is the] opportunity for mutually pursued spiritual growth, its potential as THE transformative force available to us which I, too, have often thought is the true nature of love and partnership.”
– Kathleen Gyurkey, Parlor editor
Love incites a genuine willingness within you to try new things or change old ways, based on what you find yourself learning and experiencing with the person you love. This is not the same thing as, say, when resentful friends mutter “Ball-and-chain” or “Ever since she started seeing him, she’s so different.” The changes I’m talking about are more positive, more admirable – even something as simple as trying new foods or exercising more. What Gyurkey explains above in the quotation I’ve found true, too: this transformative nature of a loving partnership – specific to me, my willingness to try new things, to change old ways, and generally to have a more ready, unsummoned conscientiousness, I guess like a kind of empathy. My experience was all these things, a willingness to become somebody else, somebody new, as compared to all I’d been up until then. And the prospect of change was exhilarating! I felt most honestly, vulnerably willing to be and think and do things anew… almost even surrendered to it although not from duress, not at all. From inspiration. I was excited to see who I would become, to see where her influence and our relationship might take me and, thereby, her and us. I looked forward to the future, to time together, because of what it promised. Separate to romance and couples, I think a good dramatic example of what I mean is Ebenezer Scrooge, whom love changed for the better, long-term, in a way that everybody else could see and appreciate.
Love needs balance. The one person can’t be always giving and the other always receiving, the one always complaining and the other always consoling. If one cooks, then have the other do the dishes. At the extreme, just to carry the example, if one says, “Love, I will die for you,” and the other replies, “As for me, I’m not so sure,” then this relationship will not work. But wait, don’t fault only one side. The first person speaks passionately but only ought to make such a committed pledge being reasonably certain the second will reciprocate. The second person should reconsider (a) whether they’ve truly been appreciating their partner’s amazing love or just consuming it, and (b) whether this relationship is what they want at all if – as (a) would suggest – return-sacrifice just hasn’t been happening. Hmm, this is not the greatest example since no one would rationalize, “Well, since they are willing to die for me, I’d better return the favour”; two people who are willing to die for each other just are, they would just do it, and likely, it would simply be one of those deeply felt but unspoken things. Anyhow, I think the point is clear.
Love can induce ridiculous irrationality, whether as acute panic or burning more slowly over time. The clichés are out there, “crime of passion” and “temporary insanity” being of the acute nature, and “love is blind” being slower. These tend to be negative clichés, too, but I don’t mean to say that irrationality is only negative. Essentially, love can make people do or say things they may not otherwise have done or said. I stress “may not” because, without a situation, it’s hard to know consequences (as in, “He did this because of the consequences,” or “No, she did this in spite of the consequences”). And hey, obviously, everything has consequences, but if we act in search of certain ones, or if we act at the risk of certain ones, either way we might look irrational. Hollywood uses irrationality as a sympathetic character trait – “Ah, they did it for love!” – and it usually pays off with the Happy Ending, where everybody else smiles at each other, as if to say, “Gosh, do you feel as silly as me now for judging them?” It’s ironic that I turn to Hollywood for my positive-cliché counter-point, and hey! if only life were that simplistic every time… but I think the larger point is about the kind of judgment we level upon people – people we label “irrational” – who are acting out of love. I guess I’m saying (again, as long as it’s not destructive or harmful) that we ought to afford such “irrational” people a little empathy and patience before judging them.
Love develops your empathy. What’s more, you grow not just more willing but more able to see matters from the perspective of the person you love. And what’s more, your empathy will grow stronger with the passage of time, as you grow closer and more intimately connected with that person: seeing through their eyes, thinking with their thoughts, eventually becomes as natural to you as seeing and thinking with your own. You wind up sharing in a way that’s inseparably connected, where the two people together sort of take on the qualities of a shared, mutual person. It’s part of (but not all of) the whole two-become-one thing of marriage.
Sex alone is not love. Sex is a physical act, an actual connective joining of two bodies, and any pair of people can have sex – physically gratifying (perhaps not even) but either way, over when it’s over, regardless. But when two people who love each other, who share all these other, profound aspects of love between them, when they physically, sexually connect, yes, it’s still something physical, but I think what’s physical must be transcended, mentally / emotionally / spiritually. The physical joining becomes something so much more than just the physical act; gratifying in so much deeper a way, exponentially better than some orgasm-finish. In fact, sex between two not-in-love people eventually can drive a wedge between them, and while I’m not sure why, I can guess part of it is because it never gets any better and maybe even gets dull.
There’s also an emotional destruction that I’d argue results from sex between two not-in-love people, which is harder to pin down other than to say it happens. Maybe it’s because sex is so personal – even in a one-night encounter, to have sex is to join, and that reveals an intimate part of yourself to somebody else; you really leave yourself open and vulnerable. And if you’re that intimate and open with this somebody else how-many-times over, having sex without love, paying for the cost of fleeting orgasms with vulnerability, there’s bound to be a devaluing effect on you eventually. Perhaps you’ve witnessed this or, unfortunately, experienced it – I suspect I have. But we need love if we want a lasting, meaningful relationship that includes sex. Love keeps sex fresh and enticing, and love gives sex a reason, one beyond your ‘self’. That might sound strange, a ‘reason’. Love gives sex a context – that probably sounds strange too! – where the climax way surpasses physical pleasure. Love makes sex meaningful, and beautiful. Finally, if you were to substitute here for “sex” any other intimate physical encounters, clothes on or off or whatever, I think it’s fair to say all this still basically applies. Or how about this: whatever the case may be, intimate encounters between two people are only as meaningful between them as the time they’ve spent developing their friendship first and, subsequently, their love. But romance, intimacy, whatever to call it, needs time and can’t be rushed. It has to work for both. It might develop for you. It might not.
Love needs passion. Passion is its fuel – or no, better to say, passion is the hi-test / premium-grade fuel, the stuff that burns the hottest, the most efficiently, and (therefore) the quickest. For that reason, passion needs to be replenished more frequently. When it’s not, things grow stale, fun fades, a relationship becomes diluted by mundanities and same-ol’ same-ol’. Passion is also infectious, contagious. Your passion for the person you love excites them just as theirs excites you, and it’s a mutually-perpetuating cycle… but so is the lack of passion, which means it’s up to both people in a relationship to share the renewal of that burning passion where they found their love for each other in the first place. That’s where the other facets and benefits of love come in. If all the other facets contribute, a couple feels all-the-more exhilarated, thrilled, rewarded, making two people, deeply in love with each other, pretty motivated – selfishly, yes, as in, ‘If I do this for the other, it will give back for me because they will make me feel good’. But selflessly too, as in ‘I appreciate all they do to make me feel good, and I want to give back to them, which will then return to me, which then I will appreciate’, and so on in the mutual cycle, without a necessary end.
I would often say, “I like who I am with you,” utterly sincere, feeling it as much a compliment for her as truth for me, something motivating and feel-good for her in return. Helping me to be a better person and feel better about who I was, she lifted me, made me genuinely happy. It was the most free, uninhibited, willing-and-able-to-be-myself experience I’ve had in adult life. And I tried my best to be something she could feel happy about; something visceral and transformative for me was a return for her, investing that part of myself into her and, so, into us – helping the other helps you, which helps you both. Win:win, and ever onwards, self-propelling. Passion. I suppose I can only truly say I had begun to commit everything of me to her, going the other way. I have never been more genuine or vulnerable with anybody as I was then, with her. I offered all of me, all I had, without pretension – that was how genuine I felt, and confident, and comfortable, and safe, to be utterly myself and feel accepted and appreciated for it. To feel loved: as motivating as motivated. I trusted her absolutely, and I offered her me, the most true love I had or even knew how to give.
Love is wondrous. Who wouldn’t want to feel all these good things about themselves and the other, especially knowing that it’s all felt thanks to themselves and the other? People are social creatures, and being alone is not how we’re built to flourish. Love and all its facets together are proactive, which makes love self-sustaining, but self-sustaining is thanks to the effort and existence of the two singular people, together in love, if that makes sense. It’s not dependency for either person, but maybe the love itself is dependent on the willing effort of the two people – to exist, love needs both people contributing and committed to each other. Love is dependent upon the two people to sustain it: willingly, mutually, lovingly. You want to do things for the person you love, it wouldn’t even cross your mind to think twice…
“I am doing this for the person I love.”
“Really, why?”
“… um, er, because I love them!”
There’s that irrationality, basically a logical fallacy of cyclical reasoning. But it works. For all its illogic, it’s human, and it works. And for that, love and all its facets are to be valued, enjoyed, and treasured, and accepting of idiosyncrasies, annoyances, or even character flaws that the other person might have: “I love this person!” But understand: love is not blind, and not a dependency; neither of these is love. Love is not love “in spite of” the partner’s flaws, or your own. What’s good about the person you love, and what’s good between you, together, diminishes negatives as “not worth troubling over.” You may not even notice some negatives. Or, hmm, not to say we don’t notice things – foibles, irritations, worse – but some of what we notice we grow accustomed to, perhaps even fond of! But, at the core, you love that person (a) because of who they are to you, (b) because of who they are for you – and yes, I think (a) and (b) are different – and (c) because of who they help you to become, who they make you want and strive to be. As you strive both for yourself and for them in return, you complement each other – the hand-in-glove, engaged in what is really the ultimately perfect mutual trade-off of taking for personal growth and giving for relational health. Well, maybe that last bit sounds like an advert or magazine sidebar, but I still think it’s true.
Love can leave us vulnerable… even in a blog post. I think that comes from being honest, which maybe doesn’t seem so odd to say while posting on-line – how many might read this whom I have never met? It’s a big, big world, and even the most popular could still be said to live in a world of strangers. And if we haven’t been taught along the way to be wary of strangers, to not trust just any old person who comes along, then surely we’ve learned that lesson the hard way. We ought to respect everybody, fundamentally at least, if not any more than that. But I agree and think it’s prudent not to trust everybody.
Yet if we stop to consider what our vulnerability can teach us about trust and respect, and about friendship – perhaps, in our honesty, we might yet find we’ve learned a lesson about love.
The Rhetorical WHY 