Don’t bother

It’s like I almost feel it. But I’m neither sad nor happy. It’s like I needed a slap of realism in my wake.

Introduction: Is Love an Emotion?

For project Unit II: Is Love an Emotion, I decided to create a blog. With several definitions of love and stories and examples of it, I will try to make my point of what love is – in order to get to that part. In my opinion, it is an emotion, but a complex one. Love is not just an emotion, it is a process that could take a blink of an eye to your whole life to complete. Like many other emotions, love happens, love grows, and love fades. The amazing thing about love is, it comes with a million different feelings, action and reaction with it. And with these, I use to define what love is… There would be videos, please watch them and you’ll see how it relates to the topic. And even some of the topic does not seem to be worth talking about, trust me – that is all how I think and get to the conclusion; this blog is journal-like and each points is one step closer to the yet-to-be decided destination, which is like a journey… Let’s go!

Love is… Responsibility.

This is straight forward, but you have to listen, too.

The clip never failed to make me cry each time I watch it.

Which comes first; love or responsibility? By loving people, you will feel responsible for their lives – for their happiness. But also because you are responsible for a person, would you have to love that person, too? It doesn’t work both ways. And so does love. I think this is basic, the kind of love we normally grown up in, with our parents and close family – they love you, and they felt obligated to raise you with everything you needed to grow up gracefully. Let’s narrow the context to parent-child relationship. The commitment of a parent towards his/her children and vice versa.

To be responsible, is to care. And love is shown by caring for another person. The video clip showed both examples of loving with responsibility. The little girl’s father, being a caring single-parent, showed his love with rewards and prioritized his responsibility towards his daughter with great affection. Teaching all the essential things in life are signs of love that parents have shown to their children. Some parents scold to teach their kids, but teaching nonetheless. An act of love indeed… but that love is a verb, and most emotions like happy and sad are adjectives. They could also be nouns, but a verb is rare I think.

While the other boy’s father is sick, old and paralyzed, now the responsibility role has been taken over by the child. He could have sent the old man to the welfare services, but he didn’t. I can imagine myself being the girl, and I, too asked myself the same question – what reward that his father offer him? Nothing. Nada. Nevertheless, he was smiling and carried his duty as a son with love and affection just like the little girl’s father. Both of these examples of responsibility is obviously attached with love.

Responsibility, without love is simply work. A teacher is responsible to teach his students and whether he loves them all or not is completely a different story. An attorney is responsible to defend his client, but loving the client would be unethical.

Responsibility is not an emotion. I could deduce it as a reflex towards love, but we feel responsible. Now… if what we feel is our emotions, does that mean there is a word missing in the English vocabulary to define the feeling of being responsible? We have guilt – but guilt is the conscience in us born from not being responsible. Coming back to love, which in this case is the stimulus to responsibility, is kind of… not an emotion. But it does trigger a reaction/behavior – an emotional response.

In this context, it is an unchanging, unbreakable tie (normal) children and parents have between each other. Unlike other emotions like happiness (my easiest and most dependable emotion), happiness is felt at moments, but love to parents/children rarely disappears. It could be stronger or weaker, but surely, normally – it is still there. So I’d say – just to be bold – that this love is not an emotion. I would say it is stronger than that – but I honestly have no idea what that higher thing is. I shall resume in other topics.

Love is… A Game.

Lady Gaga introduced us to the Love Game.

Some cool people say that love is just a game. Usually in games, the last man standing wins. But love is so twisted, the first man to leave is said to win. Is that so? I used to believe so. But I stood corrected. By Amy Winehouse, out of all people.

What is a game? As a noun, it is a play that sometimes involves tactics or mere luck, and usually involved more than one person, for the purpose of having fun (like sports… which everyone keeps telling me it’s fun). The definition of game sounds like love; it is tactical at times, and only the lucky ones fall in love, and the purpose of finding love is for happiness, which is fun. Unless you lose then it’s not fun anymore – losing both love and game isn’t fun most of the times, but there are always exceptions according to situations. I’ve heard a saying that ‘Love is like playing the piano. First you must learn to play by the rules, then you must forget the rules and play from your heart’. Lets keep the game in context of usual sports and love in context of one person having a deep affection towards the other.

What does a game makes you feel? Challenged. The rush, excitement and hope because you have a teeny weeny bit of fear inside but you just want to go with it because that is what you want to do. The best of all, that feeling makes you feel more alive than ever, and the closer to winning, the closer feel you are to being fulfilled. Ah, the rush of love is as exciting as the game. Have you ever been young, stupid, and in love? But stupidity is not a bad thing in love. I have learnt that it was the package. When you’re young and innocent about love, you are as young and innocent as a new soccer player in the field. The unpredictable goals are priceless to you because you have the least experiences to compare them to. And as you grow older, you grow more experienced, and the goals are becoming more and more predictable. The trade-off is… it becomes less and less exciting. Well it is exciting, but the rush is never the same when you were younger.

Albeit the similarities of love and game, love does not seem to welcome more than two players. They say the more the merrier? Not in this case. It’s a complicated game with no obvious rules where either nobody or anybody could be the judge. There are just right and wrong. The Right Feeling and The Wrong Feeling, that is. And it could only be right at the right moment. That’s it! It is an emotion! Ahh.. isn’t it great to come to the answer as fast as this? No, we’re not done.

Let’s touch on the appraisal of love, as an emotion. In a normal situation people feel love.

1) Is it a positive or negative feeling?

Already a tricky question. This comes back to the congruency of the emotion to us. Mostly in my opinion, it is a positive feeling, given the fact that falling in love pumps happy hormones when you want to feel it. Negative, given that you realize you’re not supposed to feel it. Like loving a married person… and he/she is not married to you.

2)Does this concern me? Am I responsible?

Nothing concerns more than this, and how can someone or anyone be responsible falling in love?…

3) Can I do anything about it?

…no.

Let’s do the appraisal of winning a game. A real game… say, tennis.

1) Is it a positive feeling?

Yes!

2)Does this concern me?

Yes!

Maybe the above approach is a bad approach. I can see it is diverging instead of approaching a conclusion; well, they say love breaks down the system. The winning-a-game situation should induce happiness, and not always in love. So love may not be a game, after all. (What logic is this?) Is love an emotion or not?

We should jump into the next topic.

Random Emotional Cartoon

Lazy artist doing copy-and-paste...

Notice that the artist categorized Love with other well-known universal emotions such as Fear and Anger. However, even if the actress-on-botox could express basic emotions; what does a face of love looks like? The recognition and labeling of these innate emotions are also known to be universal, but Love, on the other hand is not universal. If you can tell, like an expert on love or like a wise grandpa that’s great; but most of us cannot just tell what exactly the face of love is. So what is the rationale of that cartoon anyways?

Love is…Greed.

Hunger, thirst, desperation, selfishness, and lust makes greed, greedier. Wow, that all kind of sum up to a huge pile of negative words. I’m picking up the bad stuff all around about love and putting it the best as I can in a few paragraphs. Which part of love makes people in love act with sudden stupidity. Lovers are a selfish species. Hey, a lot of people are disagreeing with that notion, I see. Hmm… I have a good picture down here, lets see…

The couple who fell in love at first sight, get married, and died together; all in less than 3 days.

I love Romeo and Juliet; I watched the one with Leonardo DiCaprio over and over again and cried over them over and over again, too.  I know it’s a fictional love story and might not even valid to be called a legitimate example of love, but hey – we’re talking about Romeo and Juliet – Shakespearean’s ultimate creation! Besides, everyone would agree this must be an example of the pure, true love because they are one of the most famous couple on the planet – and they don’t even exists!

Of course, it was the late fifteenth century; and everyone should be married young (Juliet is said to be thirteen). And I thought, such a waste! I mean, what does a thirteen year-old little girl knows much about love, anyway? She’d just reached puberty, for God’s sake! I’m appalled that a girl that young and a man has to die in the name of love in order to be united. This is obviously a Lose/Lose situation – the tragic ending that is more tragic than a Win/Lose ending. A Win/Lose situation would be Paris marrying Juliet, we all sad, but they all live. But noooo… Romeo, now a fugitive, is a selfish man. He was banished. As in ‘bankrupt’ in today’s word. So you ask, yeah, what’s selfish about wanting to be with the one you love most?

I say, when you’re bankrupt and you still want to carry a little girl around with what, love to feed on for dinner? You must be one selfish man, because this girl could live lavishly for the next quarter of century. Yeah she would be devastated, but she’ll move on. Human cope with sadness, well most of us do. The rest shoot themselves before the coping process even starts. Or in this story, a dagger through the heart. Selfish is killing yourself when there are others who care about you (maybe not so much in this story – but you’ve read about maternal/paternal love – it’s always there). Selfish is wanting that you love most all you yourself no matter what. Wait, that sounds like greed, too! Yeah, I’m stretching it… (*evil laugh*)

We understand that the negativities are the acts of love; the behavioral reaction because of the feelings manifested in them. And that feeling is love – which is Shakespeare’s point, too. That love is an emotion that we cannot seem to regulate; only limit its response. But rarely people in love respond towards the motive of ‘the best alternative’, instead they reacted towards the stupidest and illogical response because that is their unconscious desires… like a Freudian slip. But if Shakespeare said Love is an emotion, then what more can I say? I can say that stating Love is an Emotion is only pragmatic; we choose to say that it is true, not because it corresponds things “really are”, but because it has proven useful in predicting the behavior in relative with other emotions. The day a theory stops being useful is the day it is replaced with another one.

But yes, I’d say Romeo and Juliet are expressing their emotions of love towards each other by behaving that way, thus an emotion it is, for now. We are only half-way through.

Love is…Devotion.

We are getting there. This could be the one discussion that determine either love is an emotion or not… or not. Devotion, however has the complete opposite characteristics comparing to greed. Why, love really creates different types of behavior to different people! I have started out undecided on love, as I always have – but my hypothesis was that love is an emotion. Nevertheless, as I elaborate on love more and more and through my readings, analysis and observations, love seems less and less likely to be an emotion. Lets take a look on (a small part of) Khalil Gibran’s work on Love, from  his published book in 1923, The Prophet.

________________________________________________

On Love

When love beckons to you, follow him,

Though his ways are hard and steep.

And when his wings enfold you yield to him,

Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.

And when he speaks to you believe in him,

Though his voice may shatter your dreams

as the north wind lays waste the garden.

_________________________________________________

*source by katsandogz

And in this poem Gibran expressed love as an entity, or personifying it to emphasize its function – not as an emotion, but more of guidance. A guide to be followed because that guide is your faith in God. Or devotion towards God. There are many different kinds of devotion; some are hopeless devotion, and some are hopeful devotion. And we are on hopeful devotion, that is the love and devotion towards God. Not all of us are ‘enlightened’ with the realization of the existence of God, but I would say that the love born in faith of God is not like love we had talked about in past topics.

Let me share a story with you about whether to believe in God or not that I quoted from Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar – which primarily talks about philosophy…

Pascal’s Wager

The seventeenth century French mathematician Blaise Pascal argued that whether or not to believe in God is essentially engaging in a wager. If we choose to behave as if there is a God and we got to the end, and it turns out there isn’t; it’s not such a big deal.  Well, maybe we’ve lost the ability to thoroughly enjoy the Seven Deadly Sins (did we…?), but that’s small potatoes compared to the alternatives. If we bet there isn’t a God, and get to the end only to find out there is a God, then we’ve lost the Big Enchilada, eternal bliss.

Therefore, according to Pascal, it is a better strategy to live as if there is a God. It’s like, hedging our funds.

Now, coming back to the concept of ‘man–manmaker’ relationship, is there such love towards God? “Of course there is!” said the priest/Rabbi/Imam/etc, etc… If there is, then how do we love something as invisible and invincible as God?

“God is NOT invisible; look around you!” said the priest. Yes I looked around; that’s the point.

So all we have known so far is that love has no boundaries. That does not make it an emotion to me. In my opinion, emotions have boundaries. It is normally but not limited to, influenced by social interactions and our desires. However, being in love with God (or Gods or Goddess – take your pick) is not at all like that. Sure, devotion towards our faiths could be nurtured by socio-cultural influences, yet not as ‘emotional enough’ as an emotion (remember favorite example: happy) should be. Here, love is another connection that could be felt in here (*hand on my chest*) but not necessarily appraised in here (*pointing my temple*).

I’m sorry, love looks like an emotion, sounds like an emotion but in this context, it is not.