What About Love?

I have not been able to shake the thought that love is for young people. That the mad, passionate, take your breath away feelings are the sole province of the young. And, the more pedestrian, routine feelings of affection and perhaps companionship are for everyone else.

In support of that proposition, I’d offer this- name one great work of art (music, poetry, painting) about love that was created by someone older than their mid-thirties. Go on, take your time; I’ll wait.

There, I bet you have not come up with one. Or, if you have one, I doubt you have two. And why is that? Why are the feelings around love so much more powerful when we are younger? I’m glad you asked, because I have some theories, none of which are mutually exclusive-

1. Maturity, whatever that means, dulls our emotional senses.
2. As we age, we have more important things to worry about (kids, bills, career).
3. Long-term relationships are sustained by the less explosive feelings, like companionship and contentment (complacency).
4.  There is something hardwired in us, evolutionarily, to settle down and to make a family. It doesn’t mean we don’t care for the person with whom we have done that, but rather that our motivations have changed from pursuing the greatest love (stop it, Whitney!) to rearing children.
5. We have given up on love, as in the idealized notion of love that we had as younger people. We cast it aside as whatever relationship in which we found ourselves seemed good enough.

I could go on, but you get the gist of my argument here, I assume.

One more point that I would like to make though is about the conflation of love and happiness. Certainly, they can feed into one another. But, one can be happy without love and the opposite is clearly true (see, for example, every sad song/ breakup song ever written).

I think this is a point worth emphasizing because I would guess that many of you are thinking, “but Justin, I am happy.” And I don’t doubt that you are happy. But being happy is not the same as having explosively intense feelings of love for another person. It just isn’t, no matter how much you try to reason that it is.

I would love to hear your thoughts. I plan on writing more on this topic in the coming weeks (as I am trying to get back in the practice of writing regularly), and I hope that you will follow along, even if you think I am dead wrong. Especially if you think I’m dead wrong.