Wednesday, April 17, 2013

9:44 AM - ,, No comments

Am I In Love?

A lot of our members have requested some guidance on how to answer this question, because it's a question that a great many women struggle to answer with conviction.
Of course, there is no infallible litmus test. How boring life would be if there were! So this article is not intended to give you any sort of checklist that leads you to an easy answer. I'll leave such contrivances to the teenage magazines.
What I aim to do is provide you with some food-for-thought that will help you, if you are at all unsure, to make up your mind about what love means to you, and whether you are in love or not. And, even if you already know that you are in love, I'll try to provide some guidance and support if you want to make your love-life more meaningful and rewarding.
Quite possibly, love is one of the most over-used and abused words in the English language. In spite of the considerable efforts of our most accomplished poets and writers to capture the beauty of the word, its high currency is commonly devalued to the point of worthlessness. Here in England, for example, you can find yourself addressed as "Love" or "My love" by a shop assistant who has never before laid eyes upon you as you make a trivial purchase at a store.
In part, I think this devaluation is because we tend not to distinguish very well between different types of love, even though making a distinction can be very useful indeed.
I remember that someone once told me that Eskimos have 20 different words for snow, whereas we - even in England where we talk about the weather all of the time - have only one. I don't know whether that information is true, but it makes sense to me because it must surely be useful for Eskimos to be able to communicate with precision about something that affects their daily lives so significantly. After all, a sentence like "that dry fluffy type of snow that makes hardly a sound until your foot has sunk into it to a depth of about 8cm at which point you hear a slight double-crunching noise" would become a bit tedious after a while!
But I'm not going to propose that we invent new words for the different types of love: I'm hoping that we can make do with four simple qualifiers that make the important
distinctions very clear. I'll tell you what they are, and then I'll show you how useful they can be.
Four types of love:
  • Childish Love
  • Parental Love
  • Infatuated
  • In Love
And it's no coincidence that you can HAVE the first two types of love, but you can only BE the third and fourth.
I'm not going to waste time talking about how a parent displays or feels love for a child or vice versa because I've never known a woman who doesn't instinctively understand the basic notion of a beautiful child/parent relationship. This article is primarily about adult-to-adult relationships where sexual interactions may occur, in other words relationships where "couples" have strong feelings for one another. But you will see in a moment that ALL FOUR types of love are relevant within exactly that adult-to-adult scope.
Most couples, when asked, would say that they love each other. At least, they would say that to you and, at least initially, they would say that to me.
But, if you probe with a little more subtlety, and a bit more persistently, you will often unearth buckets of frustration, resentment, mistrust, insecurity, jealousy, and sometimes fear.
  • "I wish he wouldn't notice other women."
  • "I wish I knew what he was thinking."
  • "I don't know how long this is going to last."
  • "I wish she was different."
  • "He scares me when he's been out drinking."
None of these buckets fit well within the concept of love that all those poets have attempted to capture on paper for us aspire to.
When a woman says "Of course I love him - he's my husband!", what does she mean? Would a person who was really "in love" ever say such a thing?
You will have your own answers to those questions, but here's a clue to why our four distinctions can prove to be so useful.
Suppose a woman said "Of course I love him - he's my son!"
Do you see a very significant difference? Most women absorb an uncritical, unconditional responsibility to "love" their children from the moment of their birth. (Post-natal depression issues aside, because it's a whole different subject and not relevant for our purposes today.)
Now, I'm not denying for a moment that there are some women who accept a similar responsibility for their husbands once the bond of marriage is in place, but I can't think of many poets who have burned the midnight oil in capturing the emotions they are feeling at the time.
Let's take a closer look at what we might call "childish love".

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