There is so much talk of love in our societies, it would be natural to think that we must
by now know what it is and why it counts. Love is the excited feeling we get in the
presence of someone of unusual accomplishment and talent – great intelligence or beauty
for the most part – whom we hope will reciprocate our interest and whom we badly want to touch,
caress and one day share our lives with.
This definition sounds so plausible and enjoys such powerful cultural endorsement, we are
apt to miss another vision of love altogether, this one focused not so much on the appreciation
of strength as on a tolerance of, and kindness towards, what is weak and misshapen.
According to this vision, we display love when, on the way home, we come across an itinerant
drunk – weather-beaten and dishevelled, beer addled and ranting – and do not, for
once, turn away and instead make the momentous internal step (with all the eventual outward
actions that might follow) of considering them as a version of ourselves, prey to the
same passions and distempers, visited by the same longings, upset by similar losses and
worthy of their own share of compassion and tolerance.
We show love too when we see a well dressed person shouting grandly and imperiously at
an airport, filled with self-righteousness, apparently bloated on their own self-regard,
and do not dismiss them immediately as insane or entitled, but instead, take the trouble
to see the frightened vulnerable self beneath the bluster, when we grow curious as to the
sickness of the soul that might be operating just below the surface and are able to wonder
what has hurt them – and why they might be so scared.
We show love when we see a small child throwing themselves on the floor in the aisles of a
supermarket, shouting that they want ‘it’ again and again, and do not focus only on
how inconvenient it is to steer our trolley around them and how piercing and maddening
their screams are, but also feel how much we understand their frustration – and would
want to tell them that their pain is in its general form ours too and that we would also
like to rest against a kindly adult’s chest and hear ‘I know, I know’ until the pain
ebbs.
However many songs celebrate the act, it is no particular feat to love someone who is
on their best behaviour, who looks beautiful and moves with grace through the world. What
really cries out for our attention is the love of what is crooked and gnarled, damaged
and self-disgusted. In this definition, love is the effort required to imagine oneself
more accurately into the life of another human who has not made it in way easy to admire
or even like them.
In the Western tradition, it was the man from Nazareth who gave us the most memorable demonstrations
of this sort of love, who made it seem glamorous to love differently from the Romans and the
Greeks, to love the prostitute, the prisoner and the sinner, to show love to a wretch,
a catastrophe and an enemy. To extrapolate from the approach, a truly Christian dating
app would not merely highlight the beautiful and the dazzling, it wouldn’t allow us to
swipe away every slightly displeasing person at a stroke but would instead stop us arbitrarily
at photographs of hugely challenging figures – malodorous lepers, shocking reprobates
– and would command, with all the authority of divine intonation, ‘Love! Here where
it would feel so natural and so easy to hate, your duty is to love…’
It’s a measure of how we far forgotten everything to do with this sort of love, how committed
we are to love-as-admiration, that such a command would sound so peculiar and so laughable.
Yet we might say that nothing is more important than this love, that this is the love that
rescues nations from intolerance, that pauses wars, that halts recriminations, that calms
furies and that allows civilisation to continue. True love
involves precisely not giving someone what is their due, but giving them what they need
in order to survive.