Love is a torment and a joy

As a counterpoint to the fact that this week’s Family section is devoted to sex, I’d like to focus on sex’s half-sister – love – which is, or should be, at the heart of family life. I don’t have much to say about love of the pink fluffy-kitten gooiness variety depicted in budget card shops
, except that it is often also the opposite – red and sticky in tooth and claw. Love hurts as well as heals. Without love, we may be lonely but we are also immune from many of the wounds that arise from love – the threat of the loss of it, principally, but also the abuse of it.
Love, as anyone with teenage children or an angry spouse knows, can be a licence for aggression. You cannot abuse your friends, because they will walk away from you. You cannot even abuse the lady in the post office, because she will refuse to serve you. But you can be as unpleasant as you like to your loved ones in the near certainty that they are stuck with you. All who are loved hold this licence to hurt, just like James Bond has a licence to kill.
But, unlike the cold-hearted Mr Bond, you are not free because love is the opposite of freedom. The moment you love, you lose your freedom, for the simple reason that you have to take others into account. You have to worry about them, empathise with them and feel some responsibility for them. Sociopaths are the only truly free people. That is why freedom is highly overrated.
Neither should love be confused with romance. That’s the mistake Rick made in Casablanca. Ilsa knew the difference. Romance is a fantasy. Love is not for softies because in this crazy world, starry-eyed lovers don’t amount to a hill of beans.
What does love actually mean, though? It’s a non-question because love is meaning. Without love, we are nothing but organic molecules circling around the sun. You could, I suppose, say that other emotions contain meaning – revenge, pride or hatred – but love is the purest form of meaning.
That’s why no one knows, or at least can explain, what love is. I once asked a supposed expert on the subject, Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, what it meant to love God. No doubt he knew in some way, but he was unable to come up with an answer that made sense. Not because he was insincere, I am sure, but because love has no sufficient words. Love is intangible and invisible. If you want to reduce it to materialism, it is a biologically adaptive impulse to ensure the survival of your genes. But nothing makes nonsense of scientific materialism more comprehensively than the mystery of love. All the truly real things are not measurable.

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There is a grace not only in giving love, but receiving it. Some people are deeply loved, and may deeply love others, but they cannot receive that love themselves. These people are often known as depressives or drug addicts. Sometimes, like Robin Williams, they kill themselves because they are saddled with a suit of lead that blocks out any radiation of love that may come in their direction. This is one of the definitions of hell.
It is self-love that is in fact the greatest gift. This is not narcissism, but a kindness and forgiveness towards ones own follies and flaws that makes outward love possible. A thousand self-help books have been devoted to this subject. And after a thousand more are published, the problem of how to achieve it will still remain.
Love is a mystery, a torment, a joy and our last remaining religion. I am still one of the faithful but, like faith in God, that belief is sometimes sorely tested. Love holds everything together with a girdle of barbed wire encased in a sheath of pink cotton wool. If we are to participate in it, we are always vulnerable. But without it we are not human.