Topics Love

Question Is it possible to choose the one we fall in love with? It seems to me that the experience of falling in love is a purely undecided matter. For instance, there have been many cases and personally to me wherein one would just wake up with a feeling that he is in love with someone even though that possibility may not have occurred to him before. He did not deliberately choose the person, so to speak. His emotions seems to have told him that he is indeed in love. Can this really be possible? Or would we call it really love? And thanks to this site. You all are very generous in sharing your knowledge and expertise.

Accepted:
March 11, 2010

Comments

My amorous friend,

I had the good luck recently to spend some time reading the philosopher Robert Solomon. He has written many books on the subject of emotions. About Love is a particularly good one that addresses just the kind of question you raise. His prose is accessible, and you will find both deep wisdom and folksy common sense there. I recommend this book especially for you.

So my answer here is not original in any way, but relies heavily on Solomon's views. What I get out of his work is that we frequently rely on the metaphors (falling in love, struck by Cupid's arrows, thunderbolts) and on the feelings (dumb-struck, possessed, overwhelmed) to understand love, but over reliance on these metaphors and feelings may obscure certain truths about love. Love - like all emotions - is a sort of judgment. We deliberate. We decide. We commit -- to love! How marvelous!

If we allow love or other emotions to be seen as 'passions' which overwhelm us we give up our responsibility for our emotional lives. It is a very familiar excuse to plead, 'I couldn't help it, I love him!' But of course we can help it. It may be painful to choose to not love someone, but it can be done. (There will be heartache and doubt and regret all along the way.) >
When you wake up one morning and say 'Hey, I really am in love' you might perceive this as a wash of emotion cresting over you, but it is more accurate to see it as reaching a judgment. This shift in concepts is significant because we are reminded that emotions are not opposed to reasoning, but a form of reasoning themselves.

What I am outlining should help us tell lust from love. Physical attraction certainly is part of love, a major part. But we can lust for people we don't love. We sometimes even lust for people we can otherwise hardly stand. Being in love, and maintaining it over time, requires (as poet Nikki Giovanni tells us in her book Bicycles) patience, coordination, balance, faith. These are judgments, not hormones.