What is Love? Baby, Don't Hurt Me

What is love? Today we will discuss the popular depiction of love with what the people here at Hunting Sasquatch believe.

First we’ll look at Taylor Swift. Based on my iTunes library, I somehow happen to have 54 songs by Taylor Swift. Taking into account some correction and the assumption that not every song is specifically about some one person (I also don’t have any of her holiday special stuff, but if I did, I’d eliminate it entirely from this segment), I can relatively safely assume that Taylor Swift has been in love approximately 30 times (Maybe 20). She’s also 21 (if I remember correctly from her Twitter posts). If we assume she was not romantically attached to anyone before she turned 15, as can be safely extrapolated from her song “Fifteen,” then that averages to falling in love about (and when I say about, I mean exactly averages to) 5 love connections each year. This math is incomplete because she is also releasing her fourth album here in the next several months.

Let’s look at some of her lyrics.

“And I can’t breathe without you, but I have to.”

“But I’ve been screamin’ and fightin’ and kissin’ in the rain. It’s 2 AM and I’m cursing your name. You’re so in love that you acted insane, and that’s the way I loved you.”

“I’m only me when I’m with you.”

“I said leave but all I really want is you to stand outside my window throwing pebbles screaming ‘I’m in love with you’.”

“As I turn out the light I’ll put his picture down and maybeget some sleep tonight.”

Along with songs like “Back to December,” “Dear John,” “Cold as You,” and “Forever and Always” we see a trend towards relationships that burn with fiery passion but then result in bitterness and distance. I can’t think of a single healthy relationship that contains all of the unbalanced range of emotions she talks about in her songs.  You also get the sense of a detachment from reality, which leads to her assessment of love in fairy tale terms, such as in “Love Story” or “If This Were a Movie.” Really, you can gather a solid through-line of regret and a hint of loneliness. Does this sound like those 30 times have been love?

Other artists of the same circle exhibit some of the same tendencies (and I am not saying that they are all crazies). Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus, even Youtube stars such as Tiffany Alvord or the other females she interacts with on the Youtube. It seems they all want a knight in shining armor to sweep them off their feet (Tiffany Alvord even went so far as to tweet about that desire. She tweets a lot, and there are some gems of teenage girl love-wisdomish). They want to be absorbed into some form of passion where their whole world becomes entwined with their significant other, where thought, action, and feeling all become informed and dictated by their relationship status. Their careers sort of depend on it. Why is this considered the successful route in their careers?

I've heard a lot of young ladies say that no matter what is going on in their lives, there is a Taylor Swift song about it. I would opine that we live in a culture wherein the word “Love” has taken on a corrupted meaning, which is propagated and perpetuated by the media, because it’s so extraordinary that it sells. No one wants to buy a book, watch a movie, listen to a song, or read a comic book about ordinary folks and normal life. We look to exceptional folks like Superman, Spiderman, Batman, the Avengers, the Justice League, etc. because of their exceptional qualities. Chick flicks, romance novels, Twilight, teen television dramas, and other things share that same quality. You catch yourself saying, “Why can’t I find a man like that?” or “That’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen”.  We wish we could have that excitement in our lives, that level of intensity, that instant spark, that one film shot that lets everyone know that you will be together at the end of the film.

But here’s the problem. Those represent only moments in time, just like the Taylor Swift songs. Life is more than a three minute song or an hour and forty-five minute movie. It’s more than a 300 page book. It contains only the highest of highs and the lowest of lows because we don’t want to see the even periods of life. We live those. Why would we want to see or hear or read about them? But this universal focus on the moment has skewed perspective. We spend so much time consuming the exceptional that the ordinary (which really is truly extraordinary) fails to move us and we miss it in our lives (Could this also be one of the reasons some of us struggle with spirituality in our lives? I mean, the scriptures, the stories we hear, everything that sticks in our brains is about the extraordinary acts of faith, the miracles, the sudden changes of heart, and we forget that we are only receiving a moment, and that life is more than the one moment).

This past summer I climbed a couple of mountains. I’ll start off by saying this: It was hard. Every time. The goal with every mountain is the same: to summit. No one who climbs mountains ever says, “My favorite part was probably the first couple miles where we meandered through the trees” or “I really liked that part when we were crossing that boulder field in the blazing sun.” It’s all about reaching the top. When I climbed King’s Peak, we hiked and climbed for three days. Out of those three days, we spent probably about 30-45 minutes at the summit. The rest of the time was grueling labor up and down and up again, through woods, across rivers, over rock fields, into valleys and through passes. There was some frustration the first night when the camp stove didn’t work (But we totally just cooked on our fire, so it worked out). My favorite moment came each night right before going to bed when we quietly looked up in awe at the billions of stars visible that far away from any semblance of civilization. A lot of the weekend was really just spent moving forward. Nothing exciting really happening. There were some moose.

This does have a point. In our lives we are going to experience the whole shebang. For me, love is like hiking in the mountains. You will come across beautiful views that take your breath away. You will reach the summit. You will have those beautifully quiet moments when you see the stars, and it’s more than you ever imagined. But you’ll also plod a lot. You remember that one time a paragraph ago when I said, “It’s hard”? Well, that’s what love is. As sure as I am of that, I’m also sure that it’s not a feeling. You’re not sitting there one day and all of a sudden gasp and scream, “Gadzooks! I have deduced that this is the feeling of love!” At least I haven’t seen it. I also might be the only person that exclaims in that manner.

If you’re familiar with the Princess Bride, you know that True Love is the noblest of causes. I have no problem with these teenage girls growing up hoping that they will find true love. But they do need to realize that most likely it will not play out like a Disney film or a Swift song.

I also think that we, for the most part, look for love in the wrong places. We expect to find love with someone else. We expect for some dashing hero (or heroine) to strike like lightning in our lives and then, without a doubt, we will experience love. Love is sort of an interior, personal thing. There is a reason we declare our love. We say that we love someone (or something if you‘re the woman that married the Liberty Bell), we do not declare that they love us. Imagine the scene. A couple has been dating for a while. They feel comfortable with each other. They are willing to sacrifice for each other. They have worked through hard times and are willing to work through more. They’ve weathered the storms and come through more firmly connected. They feel the same levels of affection, honestly caring about the wellbeing of the other. They are bound together by connections that are not only physical, but spiritual and mental as well. The boy decides that he’s going to say it. It’s finally time. He leans toward her ear and whispers, “You love me.” She blushes and smiles, then whispers, “You love me, too.”

We are the ones that experience love. Those qualities that I listed in that example, that is what I think love takes. Sacrifice, multiple levels of bonding, hard work, willingness to support, strength, tenderness, affection, (time), bonding [on multiple levels, because a lip-to-lip bond, no matter how vigorous, will always end (unless you accidently become glued together, or your braces hilariously entwine)], and comfort. And all of those are things that only you can know. Do you feel comfortable? Are you willing to sacrifice and support despite the obstacles and the turbulence of life? Will you peace out at the first sign of trouble.

Maybe we should stop looking for love, and start loving, start growing our capacity to love one another. Romantic love involves bonds that are different than other types of love, but the core of all love is the same.

Keep listening to your love songs, keep watching your chick flicks, keep reading your romance novels (unless of course you find the entire genre below you, but you know you read Harry Potter partially to see who ended up with whom).  But I do hate to break it to you. Love probably doesn’t conquer all. Hard work will. Perseverance. Dedication. Romance and dashing heroes (or heroines)? Not a chance.

True love is definitely not a feeling. You don’t just spontaneously fall in love. I don’t like the idea of falling in love, because I feel like that implies that love is a lower state of being, but true love is the noblest action of all. Because love is action. Love is sacrifice. Love is hard. But love is worth it.