Falling in love is the insanity of the soul.
Anyone who’s ever fallen in love knows that it’s one of the most intense experiences
that a human being can have.
More often than not, logic and reason are thrown overboard because the person of our
desire seems to have enchanted every cell in our body, and there’s nothing we want
more than to be with that person.
It’s dangerous, exciting, crazy, unpredictable, and, when we’re truly affected by it, completely
out of control.
Philosophers throughout the ages have been fascinated by this phenomenon.
In this video, I’ll explore a few philosophical ideas regarding falling in love, and the differences
between preferential and non-preferential love.
Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher from the nineteenth century.
During his studies at the University of Copenhagen, he met the nine years younger Regine Olsen.
He fell head over heels in love with her and this feeling was mutual.
But for Kierkegaard, this event seemed tragic rather than beautiful.
Kierkegaard distinguished different types of love.
‘Passionate preferential love’, he regarded as just another form of self-love.
Because this type of love says more about what we are attracted to, and how the object
of our desire can gratify our needs, instead of what we can actually give without expecting
something in return.
When we fall in love with someone, isn’t it so that we’re attracted to this person
because he or she has the ability to evoke a sense of pleasure in ourselves, and that
this pleasure is more about how this particular human being makes us feel than the human being itself?
As opposed to preferential love, Kierkegaard distinguished what he called ‘non-preferential
love’, which is not fueled by passion, non-erotic, and not selfish.
Instead, it seems to come from a place of equanimity and can be given away endlessly,
as it is a boundless source that we all have access to.
He described this kind of love as the love we have for a neighbor, no matter who this
person happens to be, instead of someone of our preference.
As he explains and I quote:
“Neighbor” presses as closely as possible upon the selfishness in life.
If there are only two men, the other man is the neighbor; if there are millions, each
one of these is the neighbor, who is again closer to one than “the friend” and “the beloved,”
insofar as those, as being the objects of preferential love, gradually become
analogous to the self-love in one.
End quote.
Because Kierkegaard saw through the veil of passion, he knew that the intense love between
him and Regine was not sustainable, and would eventually fade away.
A year after they engaged, he broke the engagement.
He wept, and grieved, but accepted his self-imposed destiny as a solitary writer and remained
emotionally faithful to Regine.
Regine, however, married another man, but never completely let go of Søren.
At least, so they say.
The beauty of this is that by breaking the engagement, Kierkegaard immortalized his deep
love for Olsen, as she remained very influential and almost became a mythological archetype
throughout his life.
Kierkegaard’s preferential love comes with strong attachments and is - when aimed at
a lover - drenched with lust.
In its insanity, it produces a chaotic explosion of contradicting emotions; from great longing
to extreme anger and jealousy.
Why in the world should we pursue something that can change from affection to hate at
the flip of a switch?
Is this true love?
Or is it a curse?
Is it a manifestation of inner madness that’s been elevated to the domain of the sacred?
When we look at ancient philosophy, we discover that Kierkegaard wasn’t the only one that
questions what we hold in such high regard as a species: romantic love.
In Buddhism, romantic love is recognized as potentially harmful.
This means that the love between two people doesn’t necessarily have to be true love;
especially when it involves unhealthy attachment and suffering.
As Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh states in an interview:
“If romantic love is true love, it can also bring a lot of happiness.
But if it is not true love, it will make you suffer, and make the other suffer as well.”
End quote.
Now, this may seem obvious.
But how many times the experience of falling in love goes together with deep desire and
the pain that follows from it?
As the Stoics already observed: the problem with desire is the disappointment when one
fails to obtain the object of his desire.
This leads to jealousy, possessiveness, and ownership.
When two people are deeply in love with each other and want nothing more than being handcuffed
together, they also produce a fear of separation, which is a form of suffering.
An example in popular culture is Anakin Skywalker and his fear of losing Padmé that controlled
him almost completely.
This fear, this deep desire to never be separated from her as he was separated from his mother,
made him easily exploitable by evil.
Anakin sacrifices the true love he’s supposed to have as a Jedi, for selfish and preferential
love, regardless of the death and misery he creates by doing so.
Eventually, he turns to the dark side.
Now we have explored the pitfalls of falling in love, is there a resolution?
Is there a way to make love between two people sustainable?
Well, according to Thich Nhat Hanh it’s possible for a couple that’s romantically
involved to experience true love.
According to him, this true love needs four ingredients: (1) loving-kindness, which is
the capacity to bring the other person happiness, (2) compassion, which is the capacity to have
concern for the other person’s sufferings, (3) joy, because it’s important to have
fun together and not make each other cry all the time and (4) inclusiveness, which means
that two people become one, and are willing to carry each other’s burdens.
This resembles the Stoic proposition on marriage by Musonios Rufus, who saw mutual care as
the key ingredient for a successful union.
I quote:
In marriage there must be complete companionship and concern for each other on the part of
both husband and wife, in health and in sickness and at all times, because they entered upon
the marriage for this reason as well as to produce offspring.
End quote.
A problem many people face is that they seek relationships while operating from a place
of lack, hoping that their partner will fill up their emptiness and make them whole.
This isn’t the right way to think about love.
If we let our happiness depend on external forces, we put our money on something extremely
unreliable.
The infatuation phase we experience when we fall in love may make us feel complete for
a while, but when the honeymoon is over, we return to this sense of incompleteness.
That’s why many people, faced with this inner lack, break up with one partner and
find another, to get that romantic high again.
But completeness is not something to be found anywhere but in ourselves.
Only when we feel complete as individuals, we’re able to love without conditions.
Falling in love, then, could be a beautiful experience, that’s not tainted by wants
and needs.
This way, we don’t it see as a path to completeness, but as an opportunity to share our own completeness
with someone else.
Ideally, in the Kierkegaardian as well as the Buddhist sense, we enter the domain of
non-preferential love, in which we don’t just fall in love with our partner, but also
with the rest of existence.
As Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching:
Love the whole world as if it were your self; then you will truly care for all things.
Thank you for watching.