The irony is that the most common experience of human existence is often the most misunderstood. We hear, write, speak about many stories about it, and yet we do not fully grasp what it really means, the phenomenology of it all. The cliches written about it only add to its misunderstanding.
We have not de-mystified what true love really is.
Yesterday, a client came to my office seeking annulment of her 8-year marriage. Hers was a unique case.
I have handled annulment of marriage cases but basically for compelling reasons, as if hers is not compelling enough. The first annulment case I handled was that of a young lady, a dentist in her twenties yet. She got married, and after a month or so of living together, the husband eloped with his true love, never to come back. What choice did she have? Another came to me seeking annulment of her marriage with a drug addict. She was a punching bag, a sex toy, a house maid, and to cap it all, she was the bread-winner. How can I and the court refuse her plea?
I have lost count of the annulment cases I handled, but I can recall with clarity the reasons why those marriages have to be annulled.
But this latest client is a unique case. I asked her why she is seeking annulment. Her ready answer, in such a casual manner is that there is no more love, the so-called infernal fire that overwhelmed the couples’ being pre-dating the marriage has suddenly been doused of with the chill from Siberian wind, so to speak. I pressed on. Is there anything wrong with your husband? Does he support you? Do you have sex often? Are you battered? I only received the nays . Simply put, the music just died, and there is no more reason to dance in the dance floor of life.
Grim, eerie, but compellingly true. There is only left a cold chill between the couple.
Which lead to us to re-examine, what is love really.
There is this favorite article written superbly by a Spanish Philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno, “Love, Suffering, Pity, And Personality”. I used to lecture it to my students a week before the Valentine’s day. I never fail to get their total attention. Love is such an interesting topic that cuts-across ages.
Love is not a concept. It is a human experience; it sparks, grows, or dies, depending on the couple. Although homo sapiens has evolved into an intelligent animal, man is still part of the kingdom animalia, and not seraphims and cherubims. Man still is an animal driven by instincts, by the the physio-chemical processes, although his intelligence may filter the most primal emotions, and suppress their outward manifestations. The first encounter with the beloved, and this you must accept, is driven not out of love, but the whole gamut of lust, attraction, and longing. When you are wired emotionally, then you start to experience this loving relationship.
Just like any human relationship, be it love or say, even hatred, it grows or dies, depending on the couple. The lover is still an individual, and how he relates to this loving relation depends largely on the kind of person he is. The bond of love is strengthened not by how much a lover has become unique, but rather, how far the couple have forged a common personality, a one loving experience which they can identify with, not as an individual, but together as one. And the forging of this common personality is not borne out of the joys of love but of the suffering the couple has to endure in order to sustain the loving relation.
To paraphrase Unamuno, “True love grows out of the common mortar, enduring the common pestle of suffering; the more they suffer, and endure the suffering, the more they identify to one common bond of pain, the more the love grows, true love, that is.” The wife who sought to annul her marriage from a drug-addict, instead of trying to forge a common bond with the beloved, went out of the mortar of pain, to seek her own identity, instead of nurturing a common personality. Her loving experience ended when she tried to go on with her own experience, searching for her own self.
Love does not grow during the honeymoon stage. It is only the fruition of the physio-chemical processes, of man’s primal emotions. Real love starts to grow when the relationship is buffeted with the winds of financial distress, sickness, failures in the careers, or even the death of the dear ones, like, say, a child.
Those who survive the wind create a enduring , stronger bond.
When you swim in the sea of happiness, you satiate your senses, you gratify yourself, and thus, you tend to savor the sensation of your experience; in a word, in moment of joy, you become inward bound, savoring every minute of the euphoria, or the moment’s sense of bliss, though too fleeting it actually is.
Man, in a moment of crisis, is outward-looking, seeks for the hand that he can hold onto. When you are tossed in the sea, you hold the hands of the beloved, knowing that your survival depends largely on the other, and her survival rests also in your hands. In this way, you and the beloved, lose yourselves, and you thus create and identify with , to a bond, a “self” superior to your individual selves. Here, you start committing not only to each other, but to the union of your beings, to a separate personality which you can each identify with and you cannot live without.
Love grows from emotions to commitment to a self far greater than the individual. I am amazed by how the Family Code of the Philippines defines marriage: ” It is not a contract but an institution”. And if I may add, true love is a commitment to an institution of a loving relation. When there is commitment to the institution, your search for meaning in life is directed to making the institution stronger. Life-altering decisions have to reckon with the question, “Will this choice promote the institution?” In choosing a career path, your factor always how it will affect your family, and the children.
Our superior intelligence enables us to commit to a higher cause greater than ourselves. But the pitfall of most marriages is that in the process of committing oneself, the self-identity is lost. Don’t forget that, unlike angels, we are still animals deep down longing for self-satisfaction, for our individual self-worth. You cannot give and commit what you don’t have. True love is happy in suffering and sacrificing for the beloved because, in so doing, he finds his own meaning in life.
By Monday, when the client comes back, I have to accept her case. Since the infernal fire she had to her husband during the honeymoon has not grown into a commitment, then there is no reason for the institution to continue. Her searching self must be freed and not imprisoned in the institution she does not and cannot identify with.
Saturday July 28, 2007 – 07:14am (CST) Edit | Delete
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