Ah, love.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about love lately and how it fits into human nature. What is love really and what gives humans the capacity for it in a way that other animals don't have? These are huge questions that will probably take me a lifetime to answer. We haven't really touched on the subject too much in class, probably because many of us don't have too much experience with it. But I think it's worth mentioning even if we don't have any experience with love at all. Here, I'm talking about the romantic kind of love, the Nicholas Sparks kind. Most of us have at least loved vicariously through books or movies and probably have some idea of what love is or at least should be. Those of us who have experience with love have probably found (at least I know I have) that love is really not too much like the books and the movies and is probably a lot different from what we thought it should be when we were little.

The most basic question is, of course, what is love? An 8 year old would probably tell you it's getting butterflies and chasing someone around the playground, a teenager would tell you it's about not being able to function without the other person, and an adult may say that it's a commitment that you make to a person everyday no matter how much you might like them. I would tell you that love is when you care for someone so much that you want them to be happy even if that happiness doesn't have a single thing to do with you, even if it means losing the person. What I know of love is brief and I've got miles to go before I sleep on the subject, but I can say that I believe it is the most unselfish, difficult, and impossibly possible act in the world. It's paradoxically loving yourself enough to allow someone to love you back while being willing to, at a moments notice, sacrifice yourself completely for someone else. I think love is a zillion miles past falling in love with someone. It has nothing whatsoever to do with jealousy or rules. It's everyday and it's not easy, but it's worth it. It hurts just as much as it makes us happy. It's extensively flawed and fragile, but it's sort of all we have. Can it last forever? I cannot even begin to answer this question. I certainly hope that it can, but I don't think that is something that we can ever know. I hope that there is that one person out there that we're supposed to be with, but who knows? I think it's more likely that every person we're with is who we're supposed to be with, for whatever amount of time we're lucky (or unlucky) enough to spend with them. This goes along, of course, with destiny, a subject that I won't get into here...

How does love fit into the theories of human nature that we have studied this semester? We have certainly determined that people are social creatures who somehow always come up with some kind of hierarchical structure to live by. Perhaps love is just a result of those two elements of human nature. We desire to relate to someone so we pick someone to make extra special to us and say that we love them. To scientists, love is just an insane dopamine level. For whatever reason, humans are able to love and feel compassion in ways that no other beings can. Perhaps this is what has allowed us to advance in ways that other species have been unable to do. If there is a universal human nature, maybe it is that we all have the capacity and desire for love. I hate to bring him up yet again, but even Hitler had a wife.

There are a million more questions that I have about love in all of its various forms. But here, I'll ask you just one: How do you think love fits into destiny in relation to soul mates and what exactly does that kind of love entail?


And as a last thought, because I cited him above, here's a quote:
"But now, alone in my house, I have come to realize that destiny can hurt a person as much as it can bless him, and I find myself wondering why - out of all the people in all the world I could ever have loved - I had to fall in love with someone who was taken away from me."
~Nicholas Sparks, Message In A Bottle

Response to "Human Nature."

Tyson asked the question: Can all human beings be classified by some sort of universal human nature, or is the idea of one inaccurate to some?

At the beginning of this class I thought that I had a good idea of my views on human nature, or at least a basic foundation. I have never been more wrong about anything. I was guilty of trying to group humanity together and slap a label on who we really are. The truth is, human nature isn't some pretty bow that we can tie around everyone. There will always be some people who do not fit into even the most basic idea of human nature. I left myself out of my own theory of human nature when I said that everyone in inherently selfish. That isn't how I see myself. In all honesty, I probably only see other people that way so that I'm less disappointed when people act selfishly. Why do we continue to try and figure out a universal human nature when we've all taken a class and discovered that we all see human nature differently. The fact that we all have different opinions on our nature is evidence in itself that we cannot all be the same. I think the only thing that we can say about human nature is that people are fallible and do things to avoid that fallibility in whatever ways they see fit.


My question: What do you think about this quote from The Great Gatsby: "Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known." Do you agree or disagree? Why?