Love as a practice, love as liberalism: Towards a pragmatic conception of love

I have always found it a little funny (or disconcerting) that doctors and lawyers are said to 'practice' medicine and law, respectively. One would like to think that, when going under the knife or in front of a judge, these seasoned professionals would be done practicing and be ready to play for real. But when I think about it, it makes more sense to say these are practices. Both arts strive to meet the ideals of health and justice, ideals that may never be fully realized. And thus, they continue to practice, in hopes that they will bring their clients closer to these ideals even when they cannot be fully achieved.

Over the years I have spent no small amount of time pondering the nature of love, romantic and otherwise. Though it will likely come as no surprise to anyone else, no amount of reading brought me any closer to a conception of love I found adequate for something that is so central to our lives. I had long thought of love as a feeling or an emotion you have towards someone, but the more I read about evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, the more I recognized the contingency of such feelings: mix the right combination of attraction, physical contact, and hormones and the feel-good neurotransmitters start raging. Then give it a little time, and the feeling just isn't the same. So I'm no longer very happy talking about being "in love," or something of the like. It just seems too fleeting and impermanent. Lately I've been wondering if thinking of love as a practice might be preferable. Just as the doctor seeks the ideal of perfect health, the lawyer, true justice; so too do we seek to treat those we love with complete consideration of them as individuals. While we may never achieve these ideals, we continue to practice, to strive to enrich their lives and our own. How we might go about doing this speaks to my title: love as liberalism.

Perhaps we would do better to retire the old cliche: "If you love someone, let them go," in favor of: "If you love someone, let it go." What I mean by that is: let go of all the fairy tale romances and unrealistic expectations that have been handed down to us; let go of the false ideals and imaginary constructs of who that special someone will be; and let them be who they actually are. With all their strengths and weaknesses, all their hopes and desires. Maybe I'm sounding a bit Kantian, but if we treat people in ways that not only allow for, but also value, the will of the individual, then maybe we will be better suited to reach the ideals of caring consideration that love calls for. And while we may sometimes fall short; we may sometimes project our own image of a person on who the person really is; we can always keep practicing. We can try to quit imagining those we love as fitting a role in our preconceived plan. Rather, we can see how our plan might change with respect to their own. Of course, liberalism calls for us to allow people to act freely so long as it does not infringe on the freedom of others, thus we must be cognizant of the treatment we receive from those we love. I have found that it can be too easy to get into the habit of sacrificing so much that you end up breeding resentment. And it is hard to treat people with caring consideration when you resent them.

I call this conception of love pragmatic because I think it fits with the view that language is socially constructed, and words are tools rather than reflections of a reality that exists outside of our social practices. If we view love as a practice, as a way of treating people in caring consideration for all their aspirations, then the benefit is a prescription for our activities rather than a description of our current emotional state. And I think this to be a good thing, because a constant activity has the potential of transcending the contingencies of our sometimes erratic feelings. Some might argue that this takes the romance out of love, but I would disagree. I think the value of romance is found in the expression of a genuine appreciation of another person, however you might choose to express it. And I take this to be the constant goal of love's practitioners.