Categories: uncategorized
Date: 31 May 2005 23:31:42
I finished another Milan Kundera novel last week - "Slowness" - similar in style to "Unbearable Lightness" but not as brilliant, I feel. However, it had a large passage on love in it that I have been pondering all week. It went something like: If I say I love you for a reason, like I love you because you do the dishes, because you are beautiful, because you are a nice person - that isn't real love. Real love is saying, I love you for no reason at all!
I was talking to one of our cell group leaders about this, she studied psychology and she said that pyche theory says much the same thing - love is not based on rational thinking.
This leader was also saying that there is still a distinction to be drawn between what I would call unconditional love and the initial burst of excited love emotion. Both may have no basis in rationality - but unconditional love is "better" because it is a choice we make to show love to our partner, whereas the second is merely fleeting emotion. Interesting. Because I think Kundera (and for that matter the psyche scientists) would not draw such a distinction between the two. Surely love is meant to be a passionate feeling? Surely? It seems to me far better to say to my wife "I love you, I am blind to your faults, you are the most perfect woman in the universe" in a constant state of passionate love, rather than be intellectually choosing "I love you. I recognise your faults, really we're not very alike and there are many things about you that annoy me, but I choose to ignore that and express love to you."
I think love isn't meant to be rational. Even unconditional love, by its nature should not be rational.
That made me think more about how God loves us. It must be with passionate emotion, with an amazing ability to ignore our faults and feel unconditional love at all times. Wow.
The reverse also hit home at the moment. We are meant to feel unconditional love to God. Not based on what he does for us, not based on our success or prosperity, neither on our failure, poverty, unemployment, or anything else. I love God because... no. No reason. I love God illogically.
Anyway, I've started "Possession" by A.S. Byatt. It's subtitled "A Romance", so I thought it would be appropriate.