We really appreciate that our friends of the proposition have helped us with their introductory speech. Actually, instead of proving that romantic love is an illusion, they defined very well what romantic love was, but they misunderstood the very beauty of it.
So apparently, when in love we tend both to idealize the loved one and to feel in love for the wrong reason, not because we truly have feelings for the person but rather because it feels good to be loved ourselves (the logic of which we failed to grasp, by the way)…
But let’s think about one point at a time. -- Girls, and gays, don’t feel offended, but so as not to talk about a “person”, which is cold, and for obvious proportions reasons, we are from now on adopting the point of view of a straight dude – So do we idealize the loved one? Oh yeah, we do! Don’t we repeatedly say she’s the most perfect woman on earth? This certainly is exaggerating since:
a) we have usually passed by a maximum of 10 000 girls for the luckiest of us, so making a comparison between all the girls on Earth seems fairly justified !
b) we are all able to list at least 3 things we dislike in dearly loved, so talking about “perfect” seems excessive. So no, she’s not perfect, and yes, we do idealize her. And that’s actually what enables relationships to last longer than a week!
Let us engineers say we list and note all her qualities/shortcomings, with (+1) for each quality and (-1) for each shortcoming, and then add it all up. If we stuck to the bare image of her, and didn’t emphasize what we like or love in her, we’d end up with a perfectly balanced list, and a sharp zero as a total, for she is human after all, and has just as many defects as qualities. So then we would be just as disposed to break up with her after a fight as we were to get together just after the first kiss, as there would be no cement to consolidate the bond this first kiss had established. And since we all know life is just not like that, there has to be some sort of cement, the name of which you could easily guess. The idealization of what we love in her that comes with romantic love, is to relationships what chemical bonds are to atoms, keeping it all together whenever small disturbances occur.
Yes people, along with language, cooking, smoking weed and whatever-just-as-silly-you-might-have-heard-in-your-life, what distinguishes humans from animals is our capacity to resist to impulses, just as we said we managed to fought the call of the sirens down the Red District in Amsterdam, remember ? And among other impulses, we resist the temptation of bitchslapping this stupid cunt out of our apartment when she pisses us off, because something stronger than this immediate fury tells us she’s worth the pain of controlling ourselves, something powerful and most certainly real, called love, and you’ve guessed it’s not the sex part we’re talking about, so it has to be the romantic part we introduced as the gap between sex and love.
Once again the proposing team has shown a very sad vision of love: you love someone to be loved in return. What a strange vision of love. We won’t discuss this point too long because one should be totally twisted to think this way. The concept of love is including the idea of altruism, this very idea that you love someone but you don’t expect something in return. Let’s take the example of a lover who is going to declare his love offering to the person he loves flowers, and why not the most romantic (and cliché) flowers on Earth: red roses. He is not expecting anything, he is even not expecting her to say that she loves him too; he only wants to tell her that he is in love and that this is the most beautiful feeling ever. However, if they date eventually, their mutual love would really be much stronger than in a couple that didn’t include this notion of altruism in their relationship (yes, because hanging out in students parties Mathieu B. is referring at in his comment doesn't include the concept of altruism). And to answer to Mr. Pitt that said that romantic love should be replaced by stronger foundations, those foundations are included in the notion of altruism that exists in romantic love. How can you expect spending the rest of your life with a person if you don’t love this person for what she is and not only for the fact that she loves you?
Let us sum up our point: yes romantic love idealizes the beloved one, but we are not looking after the “reflection of ourselves” as Laurent S. said in his comment. Love is made both of romantic love and of sexual attraction between the two lovers, and that’s not because sex is more easy to see than romantic love (even if some romantic lovers are very demonstrative) than romantic love is an illusion. That’s why we want you to vote for us !
The idealizing gardeners
Hey hey :)
ReplyDeleteYou folks (both teams) might want to define exactly what an illusion is. If I get correctly what the proposing team wrote, romantic love could be reuse of clichés allowing the two lovers to idealize themselves, because they feel the need to do so, to make the relationship last. So it could be an illusion, in the sense that there's nothing very personal about it, but a very real, concrete, tangible, and spiky (if we're talking about roses) thing.
That being said, I wouldn't be fully convinced by a definition of an illusion such as "something that isn't personal". (Read: the proposers would not get away with that :°))
Matthieu B., with double t. ;)
ReplyDeleteQuite moving, but I think both teams are going to agree very soon, which is too bad.