love out loud: it’s only love
New relationships bring with them a veritable swag of words, all of them with the potential to catalyse as much strife and unease as the next. Terms like ‘exclusive’, ‘girlfriend’ and ‘Facebook official’ can cause many a reaction, both diverse and averse, in those embarking on the throes of new romance. But no word seems to cause quite as much distress as ‘love’.
I have no real aversion to the idea of love in itself, aside from the fact that I think it’s something of a clumsy and tired means of expression for those, such as yours truly, who entertain the misguided belief that they have a superior way with words. This aside, for something that the Oxford Dictionary defines as ‘an intense feeling of deep affection or fondness’, it causes an undue amount of stress for those articulating it. Not to mention that dictionary writers (dictionary panelists? who writes these things, really?) are virtually the only people even willing to put forth a definition of this troublesome word.
In surveying my friends about what love is, there are very few consistencies in the meaning of love to each person or relationship. Some believe you know straightaway, others think that a year of being with someone isn’t enough time to feel real love. The romantics are convinced you only ever love one person, while others have realised that John Cusack movies are probably not the most realistic representation of relationships (with the notable exception of High Fidelity).
What love does seem to universally mean, however, is that it is a qualifying word when describing your relationship to someone not involved in it. Or indeed, to the person who is involved (or people; I’m not judging). Given that there are potentially as many meanings of such an abstract term as there are people in the world, does saying you love someone really carry as much weight as many seem to think?
In truth, the idea of love has become little more than an arbitrary milestone. It’s a phrase usually expressed with the best of intentions, but also one that does not require any tangible commitment such as, say, ‘let’s move in together’ or ‘let’s get married’ (though long engagements can be something of a cop-out too). It’s difficult to get your friends to take your interest in someone seriously unless you drop the L bomb, but the arguable inability of the word ‘love’ to mean the exact same thing to any two people means it is more susceptible to being lost in translation than anything Dostoyevsky ever wrote.
‘I love you’ could just as easily be replaced with, ‘I feel for you what it means for me to love someone, or at least what I think it means, probably, because I guess you’re never really sure until you retrospectively have some kind of basis for comparison and either way, it’s hardly acceptable to say that I have had stronger feelings for someone else while I’m still with you and I have to consider in addition to all this that your definition of love may actually be completely different to mine anyway and that without some greater dialogue about what love means to each of us, it is entirely possible that we have altogether failed to communicate’.
The discrepancy between equally legitimate ideas of what it means to love someone (‘I want us to have so many babies’ versus ‘I won’t always pick World of Warcraft over you’, for example) does make me wonder how many people can be sure that when they say ‘I love you’, the recipient is hearing it in the way it was intended. It seems likely that many of us aren’t really communicating as poignantly as we think we are when confessing our love for a partner.
Ultimately, being told you’re loved is generally a nice thing to hear, even if you’re not quite sure what it means. Perhaps we should just bask in those fuzzy feelings and let John Lennon do the defining for us:
It’s only love.
(Image credits: 1.)
This article originally appeared in Libertine magazine.
