De Amore

I was recently asked a similar question by two people who are very important to me: 'What is love? In a romantic sense of the word.' It's a question I've struggled with myself for many years, that fuzzy border that can sometimes exist between phileo and eros.

Why did God give us eros? That deadly, heady, emotional cocktail. It sometimes feels like the most basal of all the loves, the most needy, the most selfish. Some worship it, elevating it to a god and obeying its every impulse, others distrust it, and are wary of anything that pulls them into a position of such irrationality.

For many of us, eros is the adolescent gateway to emotions and attitudes of an intensity that we never anticipated. Jealousy, concern, sacrificial generosity, anger, loyalty, forgiveness and many more strike us with a force focused on a particular individual, seemingly chosen at random, and sometimes with little regard for their past or even their present. 

I would like to characterise the experience with a several key words:

1. Hyperawareness: The lover notices everything about the beloved. What is said, done, worn, eaten, requested, expressed, read and watched is all meticulously observed. You feel when he or she is in the room quite acutely, notice where they look, particularly if it is at you. It disturbs you how much you feel like you have a right to whatever you want to know about the beloved's life. 

2. Hypersensitivity: The lover's emotional state is interwoven with the beloved's remarks and responses. The lover is obsessed with that the beloved thinks of him or her. You hope that they will respond with the slightest display of affection, sometimes misinterpreting an innocuous comment for a convoluted appraisal or disapproval of your character or actions. Depending on which way you believe the words point, your whole day turns on a dime, or perhaps in this day and age, turns on a text message. The lover may feel incapacitated, derailed, uncertain about why they lend every small choice of the beloved's such gravitas, frustrated by the vulnerability of caring so deeply about someone.

3. Hyperaltruism: The lover wants to ensure that the beloved lives the optimal life, which may sometimes be at odds with the beloved's own impression of what would be best for themselves. You feel that even if your feelings are unrequited, or how hurt you may have been by how they may have treated you, you cannot help but wish them the best in life. You want them to succeed and fulfil their potential, to be freed from the things that are holding them back, and to realise their dreams. If you had the capacity to provide something that they needed, you would have given it to them immediately. If you lacked that capacity, you would have tried your best anyway.

4. Hyperforgiveness: The lover is willing to overlook all faults and any sordid history in the beloved. The beloved can do no wrong, and the lover assumes an inordinate degree of responsibility for any faux pas in the relationship. It seems like nothing about them could not be justified in some way, rationalised to help them appear as a decent person. Your own propensity to make excuses for your mistakes somehow balloons outward to make excuses for theirs. You tell yourself that you always need to hear their side of the argument in any conflict, and find yourself biased towards believing it.

5. Exclusivity: The lover notices who else the beloved spends time with, shares details and struggles with, or rejoices with, and feels an urge to be the first person that the beloved tells about everything. You feel inexplicably hurt when you find out that he or she has not told you about some essential milestone in life, but has told others. You feel like you have a right to their time that no other person has, and that they should not be more intimate with another than they are with you. You may find it disturbing when you look at it objectively, but your emotions say otherwise. 

6. Longing: The lover grows despondent without interaction with the beloved. When a whole week goes by without so much as a word or a wave, that week feels oddly devoid of purpose. When you are physically separated, you wonder how they are doing on a daily or even hourly basis, sometimes to the neglect of others who you would theoretically have stronger obligations to. You hope that they would sometimes be the one to initiate an interaction, instead of always having to summon the courage to go up to them. The beloved's absence can feel just as tangible as his or her presence. The beloved's silence can be crushing.

7. Commitment: The lover would dedicate the rest of his or her life to the beloved if the beloved consents. The lover desires to make promises and assurances even if he or she knows that not all of them can be fulfilled. The true lover does not easily forsake the beloved, for the lover's ardour is not so easily extinguished. 

Forgive my lackadaisical use of pronouns on the part of the beloved, perhaps I should have used 'ne/nem/nir/nirs', but then most of you would probably not know what I mean. 

Anyway, there are bound to be more little terms that could be used to encapsulate other aspects of eros, but it is about time that this post reveal its thesis. I am no expert on eros, I can claim little experience, but I believe that eros contains within it an image of the the divine. It is what Francis Chan communicates in his book 'Crazy Love': God is deeply in love with you. Allow me to place some qualifiers around this before you disagree too vehemently, if indeed you disagree.

Somehow the image of God as a powerful, supreme being, above the sallied withertos and whyfores of the human experience, has crept into our understanding of who He is. Yes to be sure, He is Creator, Judge, Saviour and Lord, and it is dangerous to forget that. Nonetheless, we forget that He is a God of emotion as well, and our emotions are little images of His perfect emotion, just as our reason is a little image of His infallible reason, and we in our singularity are images of His triune nature. 

Just as our human reasoning is riddled with fallacies and unexamined contradictions, our human emotions are diseased with selfishness and impure motivations. God's emotions are untainted by such impurities, and in Him we see the true picture of each of the qualities I have listed above.

1. Omniscience: God like it or not, does know everything that we do, say and think. He has a right to know everything about us, created beings as we are. Let us adopt the posture of the psalmist in Psalm 139:1-6. 

2. Hypersensitivity: God notices when we look to Him, after looking at every other object in the room. He holds on to every word you say, every thought you have toward him, about him, or against Him, and He takes it absolutely seriously. Because He loves us so intensely, He feels about us as intensely. To love is to be vulnerable. When someone says, 'God, thank you, thank you for teaching me this principle', He feels so appreciated. When another says, 'God would never love me, I'm too far gone', He feels frustrated by the fact that he or she is not listening to what He is trying to communicate. When the last one says, 'I don't need God in my life, just let me do my own thing', He feels that bitter pang of rejection. Take the words of Ephesians 4:30 seriously.

3. Caritas: God wants us to live the most fulfilling lives He can imagine for us. There ought to be no conflict over who knows best in this relationship; God has the answers to questions we have not even considered. He wants us to be freed from the shackles of sin, to realign our misplaced desires and give us the intimacy, love and acceptance that we have always wanted. No matter how much You have hurt Him, He will only do what is best for you. He has all the resources in the world to provide you with what you will need to see His perfect will done in your life. Romans 12:2

4. Forgiveness: Need I say more? God's mercies are new every morning, and He shows us what true forgiveness means even as He patiently reveals to us how scarlet our sins are. When we come to Him, 1 John 1:5 applies to a fullness that we cannot even yet comprehend. However, He knows soundly where to assign blame, and does not act out of the need to feel like He has to earn His way into our good graces.

5. Exclusivity: Exodus 20:3-6, the second and third of the ten commandments. I must emphasise that God's jealousy is a perfect jealousy, not our petty reflection of the idea. He is justified in being jealous because there is literally no idol that is better for us than the living God is.

6. Longing: God longs for us all to know Him. He does not need us to know Him, He is complete in Himself, but He delights to have us in constant communion with Him. Sin interrupts that communion, but in Luke 15, we see just how much He wants to have us back with Him, and how much He treasures the time we set aside for Him. In this age, He has given us the Spirit that we might always have His presence with us. He doesn't just want us to go to Him when we need something, but to be in touch always.

7. Commitment: In this case, not till death do us apart, but till death bring us together. Deuteronomy 31 shows us a God who is committed to a nation, even when He knows that they will displease Him. We need not fear that we are worshipping a God who would break His alliance with us, I would fear more about our inclinations to break fellowship with Him.

So, to answer my original query, God gave us eros so that we might understand just a fraction of the emotive turbulence that He experiences when He considers every individual of the human race. It is impossible for us to sustain eros to its ideal degree with more than one beloved, but a God of infinite capacity can and does maintain this level of attention and concern for every one. Mind you, as a final disclaimer, I am not saying God has sexual desires towards everyone; He is not Zeus. Those of you who have felt the difference between lust and love know that in the greater sense of eros, overwhelming sexual desire is probably one of the lesser impulses when you think of your beloved. Sexuality is another topic for another time.

Many of us identify with the pain of unrequited love, for one reason or another. Those of us who have been on the active end of such a love tell ourselves, 'If ever someone were to love me in the way that I love my beloved, I think I would just give them a chance.' If a love is ever reciprocated, we feel deeply insecure about whether we can measure up to the ideal of eros. Unlike another human being, He will ultimately never disappoint when we place our trust in Him. In many ways, God is the greatest unrequited lover of them all.