WHAT IT IS TO LOVE : A phenomenology of love

Seeing the romance rife these days on social media has left me wondering if that is all there is to love. The perceived picture of holding hands, Leaning onto each others’ bosom, and all the related dispositional things. In all instances of love, I believe one thing is common: an element of care.


Let’s dig into the phenomenology of love as I have and you have experienced it.

To care is to consciously or unconsciously emphasize your presence; to care is to dispense a feeling of unison with the problems that someone is facing. But to care is also to reciprocate the act of care you yourself have been subjected to.

Can you care without love, or can you love without caring? Is care the logical corollary of love? If both terms have such a close association, why can’t we say I care about you instead of I love you.
What does the phrase I love you even mean apart from emotively enjoining the person to invest in you exclusively?

It has now become the vernacular that expresses nothing more than something beyond what conventional human interaction looks like. It impressions an ostensibly enthralling reality, perhaps because we humans by nature long for such a thing.

But who is to decide there is even such a longing that exists at all, and it isn’t just another bogus notion that we have latched on to that again owes its conception to the popular culture. Is love bound to my condition, and if it is, is it even love then?

 

To love conditionally is the fulfillment of a personal goal, but then to love unconditionally, if it even exists, is also a fulfillment of a personal purpose under the disguise of an unconscionable phenomenon.

 

Love doesn’t exist in metaphysics, for the latter is the inquiry of what is out there; it is the saturation from what is the perceived reality, and love is indeed a perceived reality. Unconditional love, by its very definition, is not selfish.

 

But is it really the case with this phenomenology of love? We have certain urges that demand channeling to take care of these urges; is it not selfish? To let the desire to love triumph by exercising a kind of choice, conceding to the same urges? Why it is something of a virtue and not a phenomenon that needs to be critically examined.

 

Want to know the functioning of love even more? Read: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40212231

 

 

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