Talkin' bout LOVE

2007-09-14

It's what we want to hear, what we love to say. What we want to think. But is the way we think about love the same as everyone else? Culturally, aren't there vast differences between what "love" means? What love are we even talking about? Oh, so many questions.

Enter the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The Sapir-Whorf hypothes is a linguistic axiom, or self-evident truth, that our friend Wikipedia defines as: "a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it."

In other words: The way we talk affects how we think and behave. Quick example to remove any confusion: anthropologists found an island culture that did not have a single word for "war" or "weapon," and from this could conclusively say that this culture was entirely peaceful. If they don't have a word for it, how could they do it?

Along these lines, I want to point out something that my Anthropology professor pointed out to me: English only has one word for love. This may not seem strange in itself, until one factors in the Sapir-whorf hypothesis. What does it say about how we think and behave with love that we only have one word for it?

Even more poignantly, what does it mean that our primary conception of this one word is romantic love? The Greeks had three words for love: Agope - which is basically altruism, Filial - which is brotherly love, and Eros - which is what we would call romantic love.

These observations are significant insofar as they indicate our lack of descriptive language when it comes to love. When I say, "I love you," it is purely context and interpretation that we must rely on. Or even worse, it is just assumed that I mean love in the romantic sense.

Now, I'm not saying coming up with new words for love will solve everything. But I am saying that coming up with new concepts for love would be a good start. Elevating and recognizing other forms of love as equally valid to and just as important as Eros or romantic love would, I think, go a long way in helping us, as a culture, develop a more mature sense of LOVE. And if you don't believe such a thing is necessary, perhaps you are unaware of the state of things. This is forgivable, but only to an extent! With a 50% plus divorce rate and a penchant towards separation that is so strong it has led psychologists to label Americans as practitioners of "serial monogamy," it seems clear to me that we don't actually know what the crap we are doing here in America.

Romantic love is certainly a form of love. It is even a good form of love. Me and romantic love - we tight. However, it is only one facet on the much larger diamond of love. Expecting relationships, marriages, and our love lives to last on only romantic love is like expecting a tripod to stand with only one leg. There is more to it; there has to be, because, as any who have had even the most cursory experience with romantic love can testify, romantic love is unreliable and generally short-lived. A spark may create the flame, but it cannot sustain a flame once lit.  A flame untended is a flame doomed to die out. And a flame doomed to die out is hardly a flame worth having at all.

But hey, I'm just the guy writing these things - what do I know? I'm curious what YOU think. So, what do you think?