What Kind of Love Do You Desire?

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.  –Thomas Merton

Today being Valentine's Day I thought to write about love.
Oh, how very original.

John Lee, a Canadian psychologist who wrote The Six Colours of Love (it's out of print). It's somewhat like Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving, a book which I read. Fromm's book is a classic, but for cynical New Yorkers it's a bit out there. It's aspirational at best. We all want to cultivate a loving, supportive, mutually dependent relationship. Something would be wrong if we didn't want this.

There is no single ideal way of loving another. At some point we have to decide whether we can be okay with what we don't get from a relationship. We have to deal with the ambivalence — what it is that frustrates us. More on that another time.

In the meantime, here are the six types of LUV.

• Eros: a passionate physical and emotional love based on aesthetic enjoyment; stereotype of romantic love. What is aesthetic enjoyment? Aesthetics is the philosophic study of beauty. You love each other so much you can just enjoy how good looking you are together. This type of love is the mainstay of "date movies," and selling point of everything from cars to perfume.
• Ludus: love as a numbers game, a game of winning hearts. The aim of this sport or past-time is the conquest and so more the merrier. This type of lover is able to love multiple lovers at one time. Perhaps an indication of a narcissistic person trying to fill a big old hole in the heart, or a spiritual void, or sex addiction?
• Storge: an affectionate love based on mutual commitment, which slowly develops from friendship, based on similarity. What an unromantic sounding word. It's Greek and means natural affection, like the affection of a parent toward their child. Probably the type of love that will endure and the basis for our notion of "marriage." Passion becomes familiarity and bears true friendship. Probably what keeps couples together for 50 years plus.
• Pragma: Head over heart. Love that is akin to a coalition or corporation. You agree on your core values and assign duties and responsibilities and march towards the end. And, the end justifies the means. The end is beneficial to both partners, whether it is mutual gain of power and prestige or 2.5 children, new Lexus every year and a summer home in the Hamptons. The Clintons, and Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin come to mind.
• Mania: The stuff of novels, poetry and opera from a few centuries ago. It was common lovers out of jealous passion committed suicide and even killed their rivals (it still happens.) Men would have duels with firearms or blades. Now, it's considered more of a female problem and deemed unhealthy and pathological. Even at the height of Romanticism passion slid into the darker ideé fixe.  What we term codependency is at the lighter end of manic love. Jealousy and possessiveness are its markers. To paraphrase Andrew Solomon, a little mental illness can be a good thing. A bit of jealousy and possessiveness is okay, as long as it doesn't become violent and stalky.
• Agape: I think this is the most idealistic form of love. It's all about being selfless, sacrificing, accepting, giving without expectations. It's unconditional love. It sounds unrealistic and dated. In fact, it is very dated. It is the basic principle of Christian love, embodied in the historical/mythical figure of Jesus. And he was martyr numero uno. 

Depression Is a Flaw in Love

I can't say enough about this clip of Andrew Solomon speaking about depression from a TED Talks from December 2013. 

It requires amazing courage to write about one's experience with severe depression, or in his words "an illness of how you feel." 

Nevertheless, it is an illness; he reminds us that it is the leading disability world wide, and people die of it every day.

Here are some extraordinary bits of wisdom I will always want to remember.

• Opposite of depression isn't happiness. Vitality is its opposite. 

• Depression is a flaw in love.
• Quote from another sufferer: Depression is "a slower way of being dead."
• True clinical depression is characterized by delusional perceptions.
• For the depressed, truth lies. An example: We will all die eventually, but it's not necessary that we dwell on it because it keeps us from living.
• Our needs are our biggest assets. I hope to experience this some time soon.
• What are our treatment options for depression? Chemical cure or psychological cure?
  Neither are very effective and inaccessible to the poor, who are more likely to suffer from depression as a result of poverty-created environmental stressors.
• Treatment for depression (talk therapy) is expensive.
• Side effects from antidepressant medications keep people away from its imperfect solution, even though many people do benefit from pharmacotherapy.
• Sadness, grief and depression are often confused. Grief is a reactive response to loss, which resolve over time. Time heals.
• Sadness is sadness. But depression is much too much sadness.
• Depression can be triggered by catastrophic loss.
  
  http://andrewsolomon.com/