He's Just Not That Into Love is Patient, Love is Kind...

So, like, what IS love? Baby, don't hurt me...don't hurt me...no more.

I have a theory about love. Wanna hear it? Here it goes (Jamie Foxx, in living color? no? Is 20 years too long for a pop culture allusion?)

My theory is that what we call love is actually a cocktail consisting of a lot of different emotions. Whenever we love somebody, we are experiencing some particular mixture of these emotions or a subset thereof. I'm talking about admiration, respect, amusement, curiosity, loyalty, mutual understanding, lust, cuteness, hotness, prettiness, shared aesthetic or intellectual interests, comfort...you get the idea. I could probably go on enumerating and parsing these ideas forever. The ancient Greeks had at least three words for love...philos, eros, and agappe (I don't speak Greek, but I do speak undergraduate philosophy major).

And this is why the same person can love very different people. Each love is different. Each love contains these emotions in different proportions, or it contains a different set of these emotions altogether. We're all familiar with the obvious case that our love for our families is different from our love for our romantic and erotic partners, and that both of these are also different from our loves for our friends. But even within romantic love, there is a tremendous variety of love! It's not just sex vs. personality...it's fuck of a lot more complex than that.

Now, if we were to believe Hollywood, we would believe that only one of these combinations is "real" love, and the other ones are in the category of, uh, something else, which will leave all parties dead inside and eventually staring out a window contemplating their miserable, wasted lives. Hollywood vacillates between which type of love is "real," depending on whether one is watching a Judd Apatow movie where the wacky fat guy lands the hot chick or a drama about Victorian England where a woman leaves her stuffy husband for a life of squalid passion with the gardener. But, regardless, these stories all imply that there is one definition of love, and everything else is just sell-out bullshit

But, empirically speaking, this just isn't fucking true!! There are all kinds of partnerships that work on all kinds of different levels, and there are all kinds of partnerships that crash in spectacular failure for all kinds of different reasons. From my personal life, I think of the menagerie of women I've fallen for over the years...and I can't really envision any of them being friends with each other. They're THAT different. How is that possible? Well...the combination of emotions I felt toward and with them was different for each person. That doesn't mean that one of these was "real," and the others were fake.

I think about some puritan couple from the 18th century, plodding along in their drudgery and piety. Are we to say that they don't love each other, because they neither laugh nor fuck in ridiculous proportions? No. Their love could very well be born from mutual respect and shared goals.

Sometimes relationships work, and sometimes they don't. And the combination of emotions involved in a given relationship IS important...but the missing variable here is the preferences of the individuals. Some people WANT certain combinations in their love cocktail more than other combinations. So, it's what we would call in statistics an interaction term. It's the interaction of the relationship cocktail with the preferences of the individual that will determine the outcome of the relationship. And by preferences, I'm including things like altruism and respect and desire for stability and those sorts legitimate concerns.

Although, as a rejoinder to this line of argument, and a much more credible source, see John Gottman's research on the causes of divorce (which I encountered in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink).