OK, so today I want to talk about LOVE!. And specifically, I want to talk about what is wrong with how we see love as well as what the World describes as love. Most of us have heard about falling in love a few times over the course of our lives, and in the English language, this metaphor, falling, should not be the main way that we talk about a wonderful experience like love. I don’t know about you, but when I conceptualize this metaphor, what I picture is a man walking down the sidewalk, without realizing it, he crosses over an open manhole, and he just plummets into the sewer below. And I picture it this way because falling is not jumping. Falling is accidental, it’s uncontrollable. It’s something that happens to us without our consent.
The way teenagers and adults alike speak about love is mainly through an isolated perspective. The language we use also matters, and I would like to say that many of the metaphors we use to talk about love, maybe even most of them are a problem. So, in love, we fall, we are struck, we are crushed, we are swoon, we burn with passion, Love makes us crazy, it makes us sick, our hearts ache, and then they break. So our metaphors equate the experience of loving someone to extreme violence or illness. When I took time to see this, I was amazed at the negative programming we have of Love right from our early days and focused on romantic love (We will look at the types of Love later)
All these negative programming position us as the victims of unforeseen and totally unavoidable circumstances. My favorite one of these is “smitten, “which is the past participle of the word “smite. “And if you look this word up in the dictionary — you will see that it can be defined as both “grievous affliction, “and, “to be very much in love. “I tend to associate the word “smite” with a very particular context, which is in the Old Testament. In the Book of Exodus alone, there are 16 references to smiting, which is the word that the Bible uses for the vengeance of God. Here we are using the same word to talk about love that we use to explain a plague of locusts; confusing right? So, how did this happen? How have we come to associate love with great pain and suffering? And why do we talk about this ostensibly good experience as if we are victims? These are difficult questions, but we will attempt to explore a few.
To think this through, I want to focus on one metaphor in particular, which is the idea of love as madness. Looking closely into romantic love, I found these madness metaphors everywhere. The history of Western culture is full of language that equates love to mental illness. These are just a few examples. William Shakespeare: “Love is merely a madness,” from “As You Like It.” Friedrich Nietzsche: “There is always some madness in love.” “Got me looking, got me looking so crazy in love — ” from the great philosopher, Beyoncé Knowles.
This really should not be surprising, considering that according to Wikipedia, there are eight films, 14 songs, two albums and one novel with the title “Crazy Love. So the world wants us to see love as a mental illness. As a result, young people and adults alike grow to accept the weirdest behaviours as signs of being or falling in love. In the early stages of romantic love, in fact, there is research to confirm that neurochemically speaking, romantic love and mental illness are not that easily distinguished. This is true. This study (Alteration of the platelet serotonin transporter in romantic love” – D. Marazziti, H.S. Akiskal, A. Rossi, G. B. Cassano Psychological Medicine, May 1999) used blood tests to confirm that the serotonin levels of the newly in love (Romantic Love) very closely resembled the serotonin levels of people who had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, (Funny right) Yes, and low levels of serotonin are also associated with seasonal affective disorder and depression.
So there is some evidence that romantic love is associated with changes to our moods and our behaviors. And there are other studies to confirm that most romantic relationships begin this way. Researchers believe that the low levels of serotonin is correlated with obsessive thinking about the object of love, which is like this feeling that someone has set up camp in your brain.
However, our environment consistently suggests and uses language to shape and reinforce these ideas about love. In this case, we are talking about metaphors about pain and addiction and madness. It’s kind of an interesting feedback loop. Love is powerful and at times painful, we want love to feel like madness, and we want it to last an entire lifetime. That sounds terrible, to reconcile these uncorrelated expectations.
In their book, “Metaphors We Live By, “linguists Mark Johnson and George Lakoff suggest a really interesting solution to this dilemma, which is to change our metaphors. They argue that metaphors really do shape the way we experience the world and that they can even act as a guide for future actions, like self-fulfilling prophecies.
God’s Unusual Love:
Going forward, when the word love is mentioned or expressed, as humans, there is always a response. What is love? Love is complex, a mix of emotions, behaviors, and beliefs associated with strong feelings of affection, protectiveness, warmth, and respect for another person.
When the power of love overcomes the love of power,
the world will know peace
– Jimi Hendrix.
From the Bible, God expects us to love our neighbours; therefore, to love is simply a command from God that we should obey as seen in Jn 13: 34- “A new command, l give you…’’ Love one another as l have loved you” so you must love one another’’. The Lord first showed this love by sending his Son to die for us, re-igniting our relationship with him, and giving us power over darkness through His son…Jn 3:16.
Qualities of True Love are:
Love is an action, not just a feeling
Love is value adding not lust.
Love is the absence of fear
Love is kind and patient
Love doesn’t blame others
Love respects others and their boundaries.
Four Types of Love are:
- Agape love- This is God’s immeasurable, incomparable love for mankind.
- Philia love- Love of friends and equals.
- Storge – Love of parents and children
- Eros love -Erotic passionate love specifically reserved for married men and women in faithfulness to one another.
In all, agape Love is unconditional love and the truest form of love. God first showed us love even while we were still sinners. It’s unconditional love, not because of what you have done, so you do not earn this love.
So we can show love to one another without being misunderstood through our relationship with the Holy Spirit and a heart void of impure thoughts. God has helped us to fulfill his command to love rightly by shedding the true kind of love abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit-Rom 5:5 and He has also given us a sound mind and the power to resist evil (temptations) – 2 Tim1:7.
Finally, let us treat young boys and girls as brothers and sisters, elderly men and women as fathers and mothers- 1 Tim 5:1-2, while we show love to all around us.
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!
