Love (and) Letters: None, Except for Heroin Addicts, Want to Die Alone

Music: The Grateful Dead: One from the Vault I've been doing some reading in the philosophy of love this week in preparation for (ad)ministering tomorrow. I've been thinking about the countless weddings I've been to since I was old enough to carry my father's camera bag and trying to remember what I liked and what I didn't like. Catholic weddings can be beautiful, but often the homily is so guilt-ridden that I'm certain the newlyweds feel like the "wedding night" is akin to opening the seventh deadly seal: "from her little box comes all woe, and despite what we're told about Pandora, Dante had it right: 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.'" I think I was more moved by the modesty of Tracy and Doug's wedding. The preacher (who happened to be Doug's father) told a story about bees and honey that, while I didn't quite follow it, was certainly meaningful to the bride and groom. I hope to take a similar tack.

Yet the literature on love (Platonic, agape, and everything in between) is dour. I revisited Sartre on love in Being and Nothingness:

Everything which may be said of me in my relations with the Other applies to him as well. While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other is trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me. We are by no means dealing with unilateral relations with an object-in-itself, but with reciprocal and moving relations.

He continues that "conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others," and that love is born of this sour fruit. I remember thinking Sartre's theory was profound in high school; heck, it even explained a lot of my often gloomy relationships in college (this battle of the "we" and the independence of the "me"). I've moved on, thankfully, from the Sartrean view (akin to "two hypnotists battling it out in a closed room," as someone somewhere once said). I do believe to love is to reckon with conflict, contrary to the Walt Disney definition. But then, I'm convinced that subjectivity is also inherently contradictory—beside itself.

Love may not be a struggle; perhaps love is the coordination of contradictions and a cultivated cautiousness. There is comfort in coordination and cultivation, but I think that we must be careful to distinguish the care of this practice with the "poor little State- and Church-begotten weed" of marriage (as Emma Goldman once wrote) on the one hand, and "soul-mate" mysticism on the other. Regrettably, I think many young people believe marriage will produce love, and that the love produced will be something akin to ESP. Apparently statistics show (according to my colleagues who study this stuff in social scientific ways) that approximately 80% of hetero-marriages end in divorce.

It is difficult for me to dispense advice on what makes a successful marriage because I've never been married and, well, not sure I've ever came close (worse, "I don't know what love is . . . I want [someone] to show me; I wanna feel what love is, I want [someone] to know me . . . ." Foreigner, yes, yes, thank you, and for the double entendre too). And like many if not most people in this culture, I harbor a secret desire, like the rest of us, for that impossible, intrauterine harmony. If there is a kernel of truth in Sartre's theory, it is simply the regrettable fact that I am not you (my regards to Robert Smith). Without alienation and strangeness, there are no fantasies of familiarity.

Death underwrites marriage. Love, seems to me, is something else entirely.