Call me a heretic. Burn me at the stake if you have to. I’ll be shouting my poor truth as the flames climb my legs: That’s it! Now you’ve gone too far! I don’t love you anymore!
No matter what people say, love usually comes with conditions attached. “I will love you as long as you never burn me at the stake” might be one such condition. Unfortunately, some kinds of conditions aren’t easily met. They’re a little, shall we say, unreasonable. “I’ll love you if you never change” and “I’ll love you as soon as I’ve fixed everything that’s wrong with you” – yeah, good luck meeting those criteria.
It’s my guess that all this blather about unconditional love is the result of people getting fed up with their own and other people’s lack of basic acceptance. The fact is, the people we love are human beings. They’re not perfect. They have an alarming propensity to change in ways we don’t expect, and, simultaneously, a frustrating tendency to get stuck in the same old bullshit.
The point I’m trying to make is that, as lovers (in the inclusive sense, as in “people who love”), we are every bit as human. We’re no more capable of unconditional love than we are of meeting a condition like “I’ll love you if you’re perfect.”
So I get kind of irritated with the claim that love is not a finite resource – that the problem with those benighted monogamous types is that they’re operating under the erroneous assumption that there’s only so much love to go ‘round, when in reality, and by nature, love is without limits. (Deborah Anapol’s book on polyamory is called Love Without Limits – and I think her title gestures toward a poly article of faith, a belief that’s held sacred by a lot of polyamorous people.)
Perhaps love without limits is something we can aspire to, but I don’t think it’s something we’re capable of.
Love may be essentially limitless, universal, all-embracing-- if what we’re talking about is the mystical one-with-the-universe feeling that we may be lucky enough to feel in our fleeting moments of divinity.
However, the love we’re giving and receiving on a daily basis is something else. It often feels downright quantifiable. And we’ve developed all kinds of ways of measuring this love: number of hours spent, number of gifts given, number of emails written or phone calls made, number of orgasms exchanged, number of positive statements uttered, number of meals shared, number of favors performed, etc., etc.
It’s this love-by-numbers mindset that causes jealousy. The fear goes like this: if this person-who-loves-me (whether it’s a parent, friend, or sexual partner) gives love to anyone else, there will be less love for me. It’s a “fixed income” mentality, which encourages stinginess and to-the-penny accounting.
Love is finite, but it isn’t fixed. There are limits to love, but we don’t know where they are, exactly. My experience of love is that it’s pretty expansive stuff. The miracle of the loaves & fishes comes to mind: when we give love generously, there always seems to be enough to go around.
No comments:
Post a Comment