Love defined

Hi Reader,

I’m so glad you came back for a second date. If you’re like me this week, you’ve been bombarded by Valentine’s Day marketing, stories about fairytale endings, the perfect gifts to get your knight in shining armor, what love is, and the green flags to watch for. I just want to say, who are these people sending out this message, and do they even know what love is at all? I think I do, and I want to tell you about my personal experience.

Before I really get into it, we need to flag the waiter and tell him to not be a stranger tonight and to keep pouring, because we are going to need more wine.

As a young girl belonging to the Latter Day Saint faith, I started dating when I was a little less than 16. Group dating is somewhat of a rite of passage for us; the idea is that you meet as many people as you’d like to figure out your preferences, hopefully get into a courtship later on, and get married typically around early adulthood. Well, Reader, that model never worked for me, and I believe in large part it is because I was doing it wrong.

I hardly dated people who were of the same faith and at the very least people who were willing to make an effort to understand it. As you can imagine, it always led to butting heads; either one of us would have to compromise on our religion or worldview, and typically that would be me. I barely, if ever, said no to a drink when offered on a date, and would kiss a little bit more passionately than my seminary teacher would prefer. My excuse? I am just a girl from the township anyway. If you are from there, you know the stigmas that befall us. Haha!

Over the years, I have come to truly believe that the gospel and all the people who tried to convey it to me, that is, my parents, my seminary teacher, and mentors, truly have had no motive but to spare me every heartbreak they could.

One result of the mysterious nature of love is that no one has ever, to my knowledge, arrived at a truly complete and satisfactory definition of love. Google describes it as an intense feeling of deep affection; pundits say it is power; poets think it’s sweet. But can someone put together a unifying thread? My personal and borrowed definition is that love is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.

At the onset, I should highlight that I make no distinction between the force that led Jesus to Calvary and the force I describe here. I believe it was Love, and not the nails, that kept Jesus on the cross. I hardly believe that Jesus had a feeling of warmth and affection at the time; instead, scripture highlights how much pain He felt, and in that moment, bleeding from every pore, in a bid for relief, how He asked the Father if it could all stop, and still He drank from the bitter cup.

Whilst ‘falling in love’ is a part of love, modern culture has overemphasized the feelings involved, with little to no emphasis on the choice, will, and discipline involved. The feeling of ecstatic lovingness that characterizes the experience of falling in love always passes; the honeymoon always ends, and the bloom of romance always fades. What then?

Then the better part of the experience begins, where all spiritual growth is mined from. It is through choosing to love, giving in to the extension of our ego limits for the other, or for ourselves, that we really become loving. Love becomes real by the exertion of our own will, through the fact that for that person we are willing to go the extra mile, wait longer, and delay gratification for their spiritual benefit and growth. It is not primarily a feeling, and ultimately it is indistinguishable from self-love.

So, when we claim to love ourselves or another, do we mean that we feel affection toward them and us, or do we mean that we are committed to helping them and us grow? When we truly love, we are able to act lovingly, disciplined, and put in effort toward growth despite the feeling of affection not being there.

Given that the feeling of affection always fades, and most popular definitions of love are incomplete, it is no wonder there is so much misconception about what love is. These misconceptions continue to cause confusion and suffering, which is unnecessary, given that a lot of it can be diffused by offering a more precise definition of love.

I hope that next time you claim to love yourself, you mean that because you are committed to your own spiritual growth, and that when someone claims to love you, they mean the same.

Reader, Happy Valentine’s Day. I wish you all the genuine love in the world!

Mbali