"Is love the love of someone or the love of some thing?"
I love you, for you are you.
What brings people together are the qualities that they possess. What makes one fall in love with another is the fact that there are things that are attractive in the other, something that is so pleasing that one is drawn to approach and become intimate with the other. In whatever form and aspect of the other which we consider as attractive, the very moment that one encounters the other, carrying all that is attractive and pleasing, is an aesthetic encounter, which leaves us amazed, enamored, captivated. It makes us wonder: could this be the one that I am searching for my whole life, that which brings me to eternal bliss?
There is no precise answer as to why human beings develop these feelings of attraction to what is considered pleasing. Men and women of faith say that it is a form of awakening to the Divine, who is the Beautiful and the Good, while those who believe in the grand design of life as described by science insist that it is associated with the desire to propagate better offspring. But whatever one believes in, it cannot be denied that one is led to love the other because there is something in the other that one finds attractive, and without it, perhaps the bringing together of these two beings would not take place. They would remain to be enclosed in themselves, without anything that could draw them to each other.
But that which is pleasing, and the will to be pleased with the other, cannot be the bedrock of love, because if such, love betrays itself by being reductive. When love is taken as a love of the attractive, the appealing, then it ceases to be a love for the other, to be an utmost movement of the heart and of one's being. The love of the attractive serves as a prison that prevents a lover from appreciating the beloved, and in fact hinders the passage of the lover to the beloved. At the most, this kind of the love is the most self-conceited, self-gratifying and narcissistic form of love that fails to reach its fullness, its very actuality.
"somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence"
-e.e. cummings
Love, in its fullness, is an act of a radical movement of the heart, from one's own to that which is absolutely and irreducibly other. It does not rest on the attractive, the comfortable, the stable, and the systematic. This movement is always towards the other constantly, and does not rest with the satisfaction of the self. The lover is that who constantly searches for the beloved, knowing that even in the intimacy with the other, there is still this distance, this insurmountable gap, that keeps them apart, for the beloved is a complete other. It is the very yearning to see, to know, and to recognize the other, to attempt to bridge this gap, which cannot be really brought together.
And who is the beloved as other, whom love cannot ultimately grasp? The beloved as the other i cannot be reduced, a who that cannot be defined as a what which is a part of her. In her very being, the beloved is a revelation and a mystery, a revelation because something is being left in the open to be known, appreciated, and loved, but is also a mystery, for there is something more that is still to emerge, an aletheia that love patiently waits for and excites the lover. In the same way, love is both the greatest affirmation and the greatest refusal, an affirmation of the being of the beloved, but at the same time, a refusal to reduce her to what makes her attractive, likeable, or worth loving. Love does not capture and grasp the other; rather, love lets the beloved be.
That is why love, as a movement, displaces the lover's very own being in a radical way. Love shakes the very foundation of one's existence and gives him a different view not only of the beloved's existence, but his own as well. But in this displacement, it is up to the lover to do something about it: will he curl back to his own self, to his own comforts, or will he let himself be displaced and move into a new direction, to advance to the beloved, the absolute other, which beckons him to responsibility in the same way that she is beckoned by the lover's alterity?
This brings us to the most difficult question that lovers have to answer in every moment of their lives as they live in love (or at least they think they do): when things about the beloved change, and they fade away, and transforms the beloved in an unexpected way, in ways that we don't think are not worth it, do we still love the person? Do we still maintain the lively exchange of meanings, significations, of personhood, the play of all of these which constantly reminds us that not all things go the way we want them to be? And we are brought back to Derrida's question: do we love someone or something?
"Even if eros is at first mainly covetous and ascending, a fascination for the great promise of happiness, in drawing near to the other, it is less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other, is concerned more and more with the beloved, bestows itself and wants to “be there for” the other. The element of agape thus enters into this love, for otherwise eros is impoverished and even loses its own nature. On the other hand, man cannot live by oblative, descending love alone. He cannot always give, he must also receive. Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift."
-Benedict XVI, "Deus Caritas Est"
If love is that which brings together what is irreducible, then the lover must keep on loving, constantly moving from the self to other, to attempt to constantly be attracted and amazed not by the things that the beloved possesses but by who one really is.
And perhaps that is the purpose of commitment, of the lover affirming to himself and to the beloved that he will always love her. It is in commitment that he is reminded that love is being always in motion, in constant attraction and amazement in the very being of the beloved. It is that which reminds the lover that when he approaches the beloved, he does so with wonder, seeing, appreciating, and loving her as if she had never been sought, appreciated, and loved in each and every moment.
That is why Paul speaks of love as being patient, kind, not envy, not boastful, not proud, not self-seeking, not easily angered, not keeping any record of wrongs, and does not delight in evil. These categories speak of love being fixated, attached in a certain image of the beloved. Rather, true love rejoices in the truth, the very truth of the being of the beloved. Her being that cannot be grasped, conceptualized, defined completely.
That is why to love you for you are "you," would be inadequate.
Rather, it is to love you because you are.
Always.
