FRIENDSHIP-AND-DATING

I would like to discuss here the various theses of love as expounded by John Powell, SJ.

1. Love is not a Feeling.

Most of us, am sure, identify love with a feeling or emotion. They "fall in love" and they "fall out of love," in uneven rhythms. Now, everyone knows that feelings are like yoyos, up and down. Feelings are fickle, and people who identify love with feelings become fickle lovers.

Yes, it is obvious that feelings are related to love. The first attraction to love is usually experienced in terms of very strong feelings. However, it would be fatal to identify love with a feeling, because of the ficklenss of feelings. But, it would be equally lethal to a relationship of love if there were no warm and loving feelings to support the intentions of love.

2. Love is a decision-commitment

It is a fact that relationship has many levels. I can love and be loved by another as my father or mother, brother or sister, close friend, closest friend and total confidant, husband or wife. The contract of love wouldbe different in each of these cases. Obviously, I cannot have a deep, sharing relationship with many people. There is not enough time, nor do I have the emotional capacity to interact in a deeply personal and loving way with many people. So I must choose. Of course, there will be cerrtain reciprocal obligations and responsibilities between myself and those to whom I am realted by bloodlines, but even here there is room for choice.

How do I make this deciison? All sorts of considerations enter ito such decision making, from the amount of things I can share in common with another, our capacity to fulfill each other's needs, temperaments, interests, intelligence, values, physical appearance, right down to this so called "chemistry."

Since love can exist on many levels, it is extremely important not to offer a commitment of love which I may not be able to honor. Inepxperienced or immature people tend to do this, to say things under the impulse of strong emotions or physical reactions.

3. Effective Love is Unconditional

Love may be given either conditionally or unconditionally. There i no other possibility. Either I attach condtions to my love or I do not. But I 'd like to say that only unconditional love can effect change in the life of the person to whom that love is offered. Someone said that "it is only in an atmosphere of unconditonally offered love will the human barriers to relationships be lowered."

There is another question, and it is not so simple. Can we expect one party in love relationship to continue making an unconditional contribution and commitment of love without a sustaining respopnse from the other? Theoretically, if the other person could continueoffering an unconditional love, the other would in time respond. But perhaps it would be too late. If the person trying to offer unconditonal love is given nothing in response, to nourish his own capacity and renew his strength for love, the relationship may be brough to an inevitable failure. In practice, however, the possibility is claimed far more than it actually occurs.

4. Love is forever

The commitment of love, at whatever level, has to be a permaneny thing, a life-wager. If I say that I am your friend, I will always be your friend, not as long as or until anything. I will always be there for you. Effective love is not like the retractablepoint on a ballpoint pen. If I say I am your man, I will always be your man. Inthe words of another old song, "When I fall in love, it will be forever."

Any other kind of love loses its effect. I need to know that the love you offer me is a permanent offer before I will give up my security operations, my masks, roles and games. I cannot come out to a temporary, tentative love, to an offer which has all that fine print and many footnotes in the contract.

5. The commitment of love involves: decisions...decisions...decisions

We have said that love is a commitment to the satisfaction, security and development of the one loved. In loving you I am committed to the fulfillment of your needs, whatever they may be. But there is a double difficulty here(I didn't promise you a rose garden). First of all, your needs are constantly changing. If I love you, I have to be constantly reading your needs, watching you with the look of love. I must be asking: What do you need me to be today, this morning, tonight? Are you discouraged and in need of my strength?Are you lonely and need only my hand softly in yours? This kind of emphatic listening and looking is one of the deepest challenges of effective love.

The second difficulty involved in the practice of love is this. It is I, not you, who must decide what you need me to be. I simply cannot ask you and trust you to know. It may well be that the most loving thing for me to do is to tell you a truth which you do not want to hear, or to stay by your side even when you are angrily telling me to go away. In taking on the responsibility for these decisions, I will be right sometimes and I will be wrong sometimes, but more important than the rightness or wrongness of my judgments will always be the fact that I did what I did because I loved you. I wanted what was best for you. I chose to feel responsible for your life, growth and the development of all your human powers. But, of course, my decisions must never preempt your freedom.

6. The essential gift of love is a sense of personal worth

My love must empower you to love yourself. We should judge our success in loving not by those who admire us for our accomplishments , but by the number of those who attribute their wholeness to our loving them, by the number of those who have seen their beuty in our eyes, heard their goodness acknowledged in the warmth of our voices. We are like mirrors to one another. No one can know what he looks like until he sees his reflection in some kind of mirror. It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.

7. Love means the affirmation, not the possession of the one loved

A sense of his own worth is no doubt the greatest gift we can offer to another, the greatest contribution we can make to any life. We can give this gift and make this contribution only through love. However, it is essential that our love be liberating, not possessive. We must at all times give those we love the freedom to be themselves. Love affirms the other as other. It does not possess and manipulate him as mine. This means that wanting what is best for you and trying to be what you need me to be can be done only in a way that preserves your freedom to have your own feelings, think your own thoughts, and make your own decisions. If your personhood is as dear to me as my own, which is the implication of love, I must respect it carefully and sesnsitively. When I affirm you, my affirmation is based on your unconditional value as a unique, unrepeatable and even sacred mystery of humanity.