Learning to love, loving to learn

Love has toppled kings, inspired poets, ignited wars, tamed beasts and changed the course of history. It is credited for life’s greatest joys and blamed for the crushing sorrows. And, of course, it makes the world goes round.
We know love is central to human existence. Human beings are not merely programmed for reproduction alone. The capacity for loving emotions is also written into our biochemistry.
We have inherited a wide range of different views of love – from Christian temperance to romantic passion- which are reflected by the divergent perspectives of various authors. At one extreme are those who see man/woman love primarily in terms of friendship. At another, are those who see this as sex and eroticism.
Passionate love affects the whole body, setting the heart pounding, making the stomach do flip-flops, and of course, lighting the loins on fire. These visceral sensations are the work of the vagus nerve, which traces the path through the body, coordinating the activities of internal organs, says the University of Maryland’s Stephen Porges.
Love’s absence can be devastating: the loss of spouse often hastens death in older people. Researchers have sorted out how body and mind work together to produce the wild, tender, ineffable feelings we call love.
A mother surrenders to her child, a friend to his friend, but not because of enchantment. The mother does so out of a deep rooted natural instinct. The friend surrenders by a clear decision of the will. What is true of love, however, is that our soul escapes from our hand and is sucked in by the other. This suction which another person exercises upon our life uproots it and transplants it to the beloved, where the original roots seem to take root again, as in new soil.
No one has ever arrived at a truly satisfactory definition of love. People could only exhibit love. Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.
Of all the misconceptions about love the most powerful and pervasive is the belief that “falling in love” is love or at least one of the manifestations of love. Unfortunately during the course of falling in love a boy or a girl thinks that she is in love. This misconception haunts not only the youngsters but also the elders who begin to have nightmares the moment a youngster begins to set out in pursuit of knowing what is love or when he falls in love.
But falling in love has two problems. The first is the experience of falling in love is specifically a sex linked erotic experience. We do not fall in love with our children even though we may love them deeply. We do not fall in love with our friends of the same sex –unless we are homosexually oriented- even though we may care for them greatly. We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated. The second problem is that the experience of falling in love is invariably temporary. No matter whom we fall in love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough. This does not mean that we invariably cease loving the person with whom we fell in love. But it is to say that the feeling of ecstatic lovingness that charaterises the experience of falling in love always passes. The honeymoon always ends. The bloom of romance always fades.
The essence of the phenomenon of falling in love is a sudden collapse of a section of an individual’s ego boundaries, permitting one to merge his or her identity with that of another person. The sudden release of oneself from oneself, the explosive pouring out of oneself into the beloved, and the dramatic surcease of loneliness accompanying this collapse of ego boundaries are experienced by most of us as ecstatic. We and our beloved become one!
We can find in love the most decisive indication of what a person is. All other acts and appearances can deceive us. It is in falling in love that a youngster begins to love. And in loving he learns everything for life. Only from the way one loves we can judge a person. If we do not offer the youth a chance to fall in love there will never be a chance to truly exercise his love. He will be suffocated and find himself incapable of love.
For the meandering youth the ecstasy of love will wither but not love. We might call it a crush or puppy love. But still that is a crucial stage for the youth. Because, it is in this process of switching between a crush and true love he matures as a complete human being. For the elders who have gone through this state ecstatically and painfully, it is a moment of worry and irritation to see their sons and daughters celebrating their moments of falling in love. Valentine’s day offers an invitation for the youth to fall in love and for the elders to guide the youth who fall in love. Will the adult world that has already gone through this state guide the younger generation to go through this phase of learning to love and loving to learn?