Wise Words? Love and Loss

Love is a wonderful thing. 

It may actually be, the most wonderful thing.

Our world holds many sensations, pleasures, and joys; but none is so sweet or so universal as love. 

When we look at the history of human art and human consciousness, its easy to see a pattern of development, of building things and thinking up things and creating things. These things posses unlimited variety of size shape and sensation but they are all, in a way, the same thing. They are things. 

Objects. Physical matter. From a recording of a song to a fancy shoe to the Taj Mahal, they are all manifestations in concrete matter. They change only when acted upon with great force, and seem to stand as humanities greatest (if silliest) attempt to fight against the cruel passage of time.

Love, on the other hand, is much different.

Love is formless.  Monuments may be made to love just like everything else, but these are mere manifestations of the true intangible beauty. 

Love changes rapidly. In our most intense and passionate relationships, it can often seem as is if every single action we take and every breath we make affects our partner in passion in a meaningful way. 

These facts are neither good nor bad, but they do allow the concept of love to be far wider spread than any other human concept. Not all cultures eat the same thing, think of life and death in the same way, or even perceive time in the same way, but we all feel a need to define these wonderful connections which are so powerful in our lives. 

When it comes to the material in our lives, we are often doing a lot of the work for not a lot of reward. Its a common experience among all creators to stand back and look at a piece, be it a sculpture or a souffle, only to discover that it in no way represents our original vision or the amount of time invested in them. This happens to me a lot with my writing and even more so in the other mediums which I couldn't even master to the point of self expression. 

Love is powerful, sometimes in ways completely out of scale with the actions or efforts that went into them. A glance across the street, a wink across the bar, a beckoning finger from across the dance floor. Small gestures which can send a heart racing into overdrive completely without expectation. 

So why when we look at the jobs which are rewarded most in our society, do we see more of an emphasis on objects than on love? Why are entrepreneurs and inventors paid more than those people who help us to love one another? Are there even really any jobs which help us to love? Its something which you can bring up in therapy and some therapists spend a lot of their time trying to fix relationships as if they were machines; changing the different things being input into the machine and seeing if they can diagnose where the sickness is originating from. There's certainly no shortage of monumental works of art dedicated to love, but often when I look at these as a love sick human they seem to taunt me more than comfort me. Because they are objects and not actions, they are always going to be more personal to the person creating it than the person experiencing it. 

From where I sit, having had one core shattering love at this point in my life, I believe the answer is quite simple. We avoid putting too much emphasis on love for fear of Loss.

Loss is a horrid thing. In a way, all pain which we experience is some form of loss. Be it the loss of homeostatic health in your body or the loss of that which used to bring pleasure, it hurts to lose things. We may assume that love and loss are equally powerful but this is actually not the case. As pointed out in by Gerald of Core A Gaming in Analysis: Why We Should Buff More than Nerf, losses actually hurt twice as much as similar gains feels good. This is a concept which extends beyond that excellent fighting game video, and is labeled by psychologists as loss aversion. I want to shout out that video because its where I heard the concept. 

Although not everyone is aware of this discrepancy of pain on a conscious level, looking at our focus on creation again with loss aversion in mind seems to suggest that maybe we are aware of it on some unconscious level. Love after all can be lost so quickly, whereas objects can be bought, sold, owned. When they break there is either a replacement or a concrete way to fix it. Such is seldom the case with love. 

So, what to do? 

The answer as always is simple yet difficult. Nothing can be done to stop the fear of loss. But I believe, that if we look more deeply into that fear, we can find love buried beneath all of that. After all, we would not be afraid if we did not have love to lose.