2026/11/01 What is Love?
'Love' is a complicated word. Complicated because love is so often complicated; but complicated further still because by that word, 'love', we can mean so many different things. There is the love of one's country for which one will go to war; the love of one's spouse, a will to become one flesh; the love of a favourite album, to be played on repeat until the vinyl wears thin. But one doesn't go to war over their favourite album; nor do they want to become one flesh with their country; and they most certainly don't want to hear their spouse on repeat. Then there's the love of friends, the love of family, the love of one's neighbour, and the love of God: all of these are different kinds of feeling, which evoke different kinds of acting, and all squished together under this broad gazebo, 'love'.
From age to age, love has taken on different meanings and different expressions, and nowhere has this been more clear than in romantic, erotic, love. Today, we have quite a sturdy image of what romantic life ought to look like: the 2.1 child family, the holiday, the wife picks the furniture, the husband in his man-cave; so often - and this is an especially recent change - the dual-income household, the sharing of chores, and the erosion, post-kids, of a work-life balance. There is an expectation also - perhaps one shared by the ladies more than the lads - that one's spouse ought to be one's best friend. This too is a surprisingly recent invention. I hadn't truly realised how radical what's known as 'Companionate Marriage' was to the couple of the 1920s until I had read Chesterton railing against the concept. Truly, this was a social change on a grand scale, alloying courtship with friendship.
We can look not just backwards to the past, but backwards and then sideways to the past in a foreign country. Most cultures historically practised polygamy, because monogamy isn't intuitive. It's only intuitive to us because, like the fish that knows not the water it swims in, we too know only and can understand only monogamy. Polygamy, then, isn't simply a powerful man taking on many wives because he's powerful and can obtain women as he pleases. To most polygamous cultures, there was an element of courtship, and women were broadly okay with it. Wives treated one another as sisters; and though there were undoubtedly fits of jealousy at times, as seen between Leah and Rachel, for the most part they got on okay. I mean, think about it, as a wife you were either to be married to a wealthy man, and be wealthy, one of many wives, or you would be married to a poor man and just be poor. In tough times, for most the decision was simple. And there was virtue in polygamous societies, albeit a different virtue. In Islam, the first and foremost rule is submission to God - that's what the word 'Islam' literally means, submission. And that was understood through the harem as a selfless love for one's husband, where thoughts of owning him for yourself were seen as selfish and lacking in virtue.
Do understand, I do not think polygamy is right, and nor do I think it is virtuous. What I'm explaining is a different cosmology of the world, a fundamentally different orientation to virtue and understanding of the truth. It is not mine; and likely is not yours either, dear reader. But in seeing the breadth of thought and interpretation of love across the many cultures of the world, we see how love is in fact plastic. Love is felt by every human, yet it manifests so differently in different times and places. Look at modern America, for instance. I've heard it said that as much as 50% of the Bay Area of San Francisco is 'poly' now. Travel inland to, say, Kansas, and you'll find a very different sexual ethic; and along with it a very different ethic of love. In the case of SF, the explosion in polyamory is mostly down to influence of 'EA' or effective altruism, an ideology which started on the LessWrong forums some time ago. Now EA is incredibly influential, especially amongst AI software engineers. The formula for EA is quite simple: it's utilitarianism plus altruism from libertarian presuppositions; yet this leads them in strange directions, one of which being the orgies they're famous for. There is an irony here. Somehow, through altruism and selflessness, the effective altruists see possessiveness in sex and relationships as something lacking in virtue, something dirty; and have somehow deconstructed Christian love back to an Islamic conception of love. The only difference being the liberalness of electing to enter and exit at will; that is, in a sense, the definition of liberalism: the dissolution of all bonds.
What then is love? Sorry, forgive me for once again posing the question, for I don't have the answer. That strong desire for possessiveness in our hearts, whether that be to possess or be possessed: could this be love? Culture upon culture has denigrated such a feeling, and said that the possessiveness is something dirty to be washed of. Some days I wake up and feel the same. There is something which drags down the soul, drags down the character, embedded within the impurity of this 'love'. I believe it's this feeling which drives monks and nuns to vows of chastity, because they feel something in their heart is impure engaging with love, and that eros will draw them away from God. Such discussions in the Christian world, in the story of the West, have gone on for millennia. The Jovinian Controversy was an argument in the nascent Christendom of the 4th century about whether to be truly Christian meant to be an ascetic who foregoes marriage. Jovinian was a failed monk who railed against the evils of the monastery, arguing that there was no difference in virtue between the ascetic and the married man. St Jerome chimed in and wrote the tract Against Jovinian, where he argued his case so forcefully, people began to think St Jerome was against marriage.1 The dispute was clarified by St Augustine, who wrote On the Good of Marriage and On Holy Virginity, where he cleared up this misunderstanding. Jovinian was labelled a heretic, virginity was seen as the higher calling than marriage, but marriage was confirmed as a righteous calling nonetheless. Perhaps then arriving at the deepest connection with God can be achieved through chastity, with marriage as a secondary method through which it is more difficult to reach the deepest connection with God. That possessiveness makes both men and women do strange and often unholy things, whether that be out of jealousy or power. These are strong forces which are hard to bridle.
As we've discussed, cultures then and now have seen the possessiveness of love in different lights. In Islam, and in polyamory, possessiveness cast beneath shadows is something unbecoming and lacking in virtue, yet I struggle to adopt this view, that the love of couples is something agapic and selfless. The emotion and expression of love is plastic to the culture - this we've also discussed, and I understand, so this could be me talking from the position of the fish in water - but I struggle to understand how there can be love without possessiveness. To want and to be wanted: could this be a definition of love? I don't mean this in a sexual way necessarily - though this is of course an element of it - but rather in the sense of one's soul. To become one flesh, in the words of St Paul.
However easy it may be to re-frame romantic love as selfless love, I think it only makes love toothless. There's something deep in the soul which yearns for love and its completion, much like the myth Aristophanes writes in Plato's Symposium: man and woman were once a two-headed, four-armed, and four-legged creature, only to be split by Zeus in anger, the two halves, lost, left to search for their mate. There is something missing in the heart, a Yin without a Yang. There is a Faustian yearning for the infinite to be found in a woman; the Night of Love in Tristan which Spengler named the last Faustian work. There is the infinity of Jung's anima, the immortal woman dug deep in the soul, who we project upon those who fit the puzzle piece. Love drives some mad; love drives some to murder; and love drives some to the greatest deeds they shall ever complete. The image of the mediaeval knight and the maiden in the castle is a load-bearing pillar for our civilisation, however much it may be chipped away at by liberal thought. Liberalism is a kind of acid which destroys many things; perhaps it is the antithesis of the thesis of Faustian world-idea, that being striving for the infinite. Under liberalism, everything has a price, everything is to be quantified. Here's your patch and here's mine. Atomised, the possibility of possessing and being possessed, of wanting and being wanted, dulls. Can there be love under liberalism? Again, I know not. I'm here to but pose the questions.