What's your understanding?
I love Howard Jones's song 'What is Love', and today I am asking that very same question he was asking way back in 1983
Who exactly was St Valentine and all this talk of 'love'?
According to my sources, Saint Valentine was a 3rd Century Roman Saint, and became associated with the concept of 'courtly love'.
So what is this 'courtly love'?
Again, back to my sources, a term coined from Medieval times, courtly love was a love that put great emphasis on nobility and chivalry, which was often illicit and between a Knight and a married Lady.
So where's all the associations and expectations regarding around romance, perfect lover/partner, sex, illicitness and all the rest? I wonder....
The day itself is an invitation to explore the concept of 'love' more, and it is to Erich Fromm that I turn to, especially as he is a writer who spent a lot of his professional life as a therapist and social philosopher looking at this. He considered that to be able to love, one needs to be taught the skills of how to, thus encouraging personal awareness of its experience.
He didn't agree with love being a magical process, and therefore the act of 'falling in love' was dismissed. Quoting Fromm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Loving):
"love today is a relatively rare phenomenon, that we have a great deal of sentimentality; we have a great deal of illusion about love, namely as a...as something one falls in. But the question is that one cannot fall in love, really; one has to be in love. And that means that loving becomes, and the ability to love, becomes one of the most important things in life."
According to Fromm, there are many types of love :
1.Self-Love - the ability to offer self care and respect, as well as being aware of one's strengths and weaknesses
It is not the same as conceit, arrogrance or ego-inflation.
2. Love in a relationship - where there is true love and intimacy, as well as the practice/experience of commitment, faith, humility, courage, faith and discipline
3. Brotherly Love/ Parental Love
4. Love of God - what I would call Spiritual Love.
I am so conscious of all the media hype and advertising that promotes an idealised form of love between 'couples'. This can feel so cruel and demeaning when this supposed ideal is felt not to be met. I have experienced that depth of loneliness and stigma of 'being left out' and 'unloveable', believing it was true because I hadn't received that all important Valentine's card.
So, I invite you therefore today, to really think about what love means for you . . .
The fact that Fromm extends the field to include love in its many form is refreshing and levelling. I agree with Fromm's comment that love has to start with the ability of being able to love one-self first. Again from experience, I believed that if someone else loved me, then I really must be loveable - my own love for myself didn't seem to carry the same value. It's been a long process of development to reach a place to understand, in terms of feeling and thinking, what this really means for me now, as opposed to blindingly buying into the media hype for my love-ideal. It was simply a phantasy I bought into, unknowingly - emptiness disguised with lots of tinsel-wrap.
Again, I agree that love doesn't just happen - it's a process of learning that I think simply grows through experience. Experiencing the beauty of little animals is a start!
Love comes in many ways, and I hope the ducklings have been a conduit for you to reconnect with this potentially very powerful and healing emotion. Enjoy until next time .