The Love Complex, Is That a Thing?

We all know, if we think about it, that money is a fiction. Money is a representation of an abstraction: value. It’s a fiction that crosses over into reality via the collective willingness to treat it as real. It takes on a strange ontological status by a process of make believe: let’s pretend this rock is a car. Let’s pretend these numbers (not even pieces of paper anymore, just numbers) represent value, which itself does not exist, by the way. Value is a collective term for types of need and desire, which themselves are terms that represent complexes and do not exist as such but are collected via common agreement by these words into concepts traded for their usefulness. Even need and desire have problematic ontological status. This is the effect of nouning. It makes on want to dig deeper to uncover the real that has been collected by these words or concepts, but that would just lead to the construction of sets of diverse, “concrete” desires (for example), desired for various reasons with various intensities for various times, each of which would perhaps also be a member of any number of other sets, including needs, of course, but also fears and loathings.  

And anyway, I wanted to talk about love.

Love exists and it doesn't. It’s another collective term encompassing an unstable set of diverse elements that stretch the notion of “family resemblances” past the breaking point (not every member of a family resembles other members in the way the term implies), including sexual desire, infantile bonding, pleasure in presence of another, comfort, and dispassionate commitment. Love is not hate. But the object of love can also be the object of hate, whether it’s a person or a candy bar. “Love your neighbor as yourself”? But I sometimes hate myself. And I sometimes hate my neighbor, come to think of it.

Encompassed in the concept of love are the things that give me pleasure and the things that give me my identity and the things that fulfill my desires (all of these overlapping, unstable sets), the things I want to preserve and protect because of what they give me or because of what they give to others whom I love, whom I’ve put into this set of things whose value to me exceeds my own value to me. Things I would die for—which seems a little perverse but in a way we can all sympathize with and experience and understand. In that odd circle we will likely find the spouse or partner and the children, in some cases the best friend. Very rarely the parents or siblings, but oddly enough the country and the species and the planet. And sometimes the stranger.

In the strange set of love are feelings and choices. The feelings need no support. I love fine weather (because of how it makes me feel), and I love woman who makes me drunk with endorphins. No choice required. Love is the word we use to allow or compel ourselves to maintain the bond to ourselves and to others, to choose to act as though no choice were required, to remain committed to lover, to self, to neighbor, to act toward them as though our heart were in it. To live a lie, sure, a fiction, that becomes true because we agreed to do it.