Aspects of Love

By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.


When we speak of romantic love we are talking about the most positive of human emotions, the one to which we are all drawn. Being able to love is our highest attribute and being loved our most treasured experience.
Yet, despite our inner capacity to love, we usually think of it as something that exists outside of ourselves. In one respect this is true. It can only be found in that inter-space between us and another person. And when we do fall in love, it again comes from from this place.
Love attacks us from the outside. We talk of being struck by love, of falling into love, of cupid’s arrow hitting us, of being smitten, and so on.
I was at a psychoanalytic conference in Paris in June and it was interesting to hear leading US author and psychoanalyst Bruce Fink give a talk on this very subject. He had been speaking of the mini-trauma that being ‘struck’ by love represents, a trauma that can lead to repetition compulsion such as repeatedly falling in love with the wrong person or unconsciously destroying our love relationships or never quite recognising it as love even with the right person.
Love by its very nature is not a solitary experience unless you are talking about mysticism. Rather, human love, as the title of the 1955 William Holden movie said, is ‘a many splendored thing’. Quite simply, the experience of love is dependent on our ability to engage at a very fundamental level with another human being. And, as a result, the experience of love is not the same for everyone.
For some it is salvation and the springboard to a wonderfully, happy and fulfilled life. For others, it is the precursor of misery and domination. Still others seem only to recognise it when it has left their lives completely and the most famous example of this is Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is only after his true love Ophelia is dead that he can truly understand what it is he has lost.
I suppose I came to this topic because a number of people have been talking to me recently about love in one aspect or another. It occurred to me how varied people’s experiences of this one human emotion can be.
The first person described a magnificent love for another person in which they were transfixed, obsessed, helpless. And yet the other person did nothing but abuse this love, ending the relationship cruelly and creating emotional turmoil all along the way.
The second person left their partner because they were ‘bored’ and had a series of affairs afterwards, none of which seemed to satisfy their requirements. Yet when the original partner found someone new, suddenly this was the one true love that had been lost.
The third person fell madly in love with someone despite a history of previous relationships in which they never lost emotional control. Being in love was a new and wonderful thing for them until it ended when the love partner broke it off leaving the person who had been used to so much emotional control both devastated and disorientated.
The last person fell in love with the right person, a kind, considerate, caring partner, but they brought the relationship to an abrupt end with incessant demands for attention, for proclamations of undying love and for continuous reassurances.
We assume when we talk about love and about the search for it, that we are talking as if love is out there, simply waiting, and that when we find it we will be enveloped in its healing arms.
But clinical experience shows that this is far from the case. The reality is that love is not guaranteed. There is nothing written anywhere that says everyone will find love. At the same conference I mentioned above, one of the speakers made the comment that ‘Love is not contingent in any relationship, it may happen or it may not’.
If you look up the dictionary on the word contingent you will find it means: likely but not certain to happen. There is a second meaning of the word though, and it is, ‘dependent on or conditioned by something else as in ‘payment is contingent on fulfillment of certain conditions.
Now, in the realm of love just what these conditions are is difficult to define. But one of them is the ability I mentioned earlier to engage at a fundamental level with another human being. This condition in turn requires us to be able to trust another person, be relaxed in their presence, be confident enough to convey an essential part of who we are to them, to understand if our love is being reciprocated, and to intuit whether we are engaging with someone who is capable of loving and being loved.
This, along with the flood of positive emotions that we associate with the experience, is what allows us to recognise love when we find it. But it is not as simple as it sounds. Some recognise love only when it is an obsession with the wrong person. Others do not see love when the right person is standing in front of them. Some look all their lives and never find it because a 'better' love is just around the corner. Others bring a destructiveness because, paradoxically, they fear the relationship ending.
There is no end to the range of human responses to love. Its very power emanates from the unpredictability of its effects.
The game of love is the most unpredictable of them all. But we can test what we are experiencing by asking a very simple question. Is it enriching me or is it impoverishing me? If we can give ourselves an honest answer to this question, bearing in mind that love moves us out of the realm of logic, then we have created an important foundation to understand the kind of love we are experiencing.