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I. Introduction

For years, queries about Love have been a part of man’s life and humans have shown great effort to fill in the gaps of knowledge about love. It required the wisdom of the ancient Philosophers and even the minds of the modern ones. As mentioned by Manuel Dy in his Phenomenology of Love, the philosophy of man is incomplete without the philosophy of man as loving. And so various definitions of such word have subsisted from the seven words of ancient Greeks–Storge, Philia, Eros, Agape, Ludus, Pragma, and Philautia up to the more complex explanations, however, none of these have convinced everyone to be concrete enough to stand as the official portrait of love.

Growing up, I have always been in love with the idea of being in love. As a little girl, I liked watching those typical romantic films where there would be weddings, dinner dates, and happy moments.

According to IJBRP’s Romantic Love, ‘The feelings have been captured by poetry, fiction, music, and art, but love behaviors have rarely been researched.’ In fact, I can admit that I have ventured into the idea of being in love too soon. But I let my curiosity get to me, hence I have always searched for love.

And having experienced it for myself now, changed my perspective about love. In this paper, I want to talk about what love is not, rather than what love is. In the movies, they have always shown how love looks like, yet not how love looks like behind the cameras. In books, they have always shown how love felt magical, yet not how love doesn’t on several days. In songs and poems, the lyrics have always sung about how love is like this, or love is like that, but never about what love is not.

‘When two people are first together, their hearts are on fire and their passion is very great. After a while, the fire cools and that’s how it stays. They continue to love each other, but in a different way warm and dependable.’ According to Nisa: The Life and Words of a Kung Woman.

II. Body

II. A. Context of the Study

One of the best feelings in the world is love. It is a complex thing, powerful but hard to define. For me, the meaning of real love is- ‘being selfless’. True love doesnt want anything in return, because there is nothing it needs. We just love for the sake of love. When we love someone, we dont look for them to fill our needs, love us back, and all those types of things. Love is a choice to be completely selfless.

When we love selflessly, we dont worry about the outcome of it or whether were giving more than the other person. Instead, the act of loving feels good and its obvious that whatever comes back to us is the right amount.

Love is completely selfless; for if you truly love someone, his/her happiness would be your first priority — ‘what you want is never important but what the other person needs and wants is always supreme’. Your fulfillment doesnt come from receiving love; the feeling of happiness and completion we have always wanted comes from loving others. When we love someone without wanting or expecting anything in return, we feel free, open, and wonderful.

Mainly, understanding the word love has become subjective and thus differs from person to person. Love is really an ineffable thing that one could not understand at once. It takes a whole lot of experiences for it to come to the gaze of one’s enlightenment. Seems like feeling love is way easier than knowing it.

According to ‘Plato’s Theory of Love by Lydia Amir:

‘This beauty is absolute beauty. It culminates the mysteries of love as it also reveals the nature of the universe: This beauty is, first of all, eternal; it neither comes into being nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes; next, it is not beautiful in part and ugly in part, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, not beautiful in this relation and ugly in that, nor beautiful here and ugly there, as varying according to its beholders; nor again will this beauty appear to him like the beauty of a thought or a science, or like beauty which has its seat in something other than itself, be it a living thing or the earth or the sky or anything else whatever; he will see it as absolute, existing alone with itself, unique, eternal, and other beautiful things as partaking of it, yet in such a manner that while they come into being and pass away, it neither undergoes any increase or diminution nor suffers any change.’

My personal take on what the Philosophy in Love truly is is this: ‘To Love is a Choice, not a Feeling.’ Again, having experienced and witnessed love for myself, I have gained a lot of perspective on how love actually looks like and how it actually feels.

And no, Love is not perfect. Rather, Love is both the Good and the Bad. Just like Life, it requires the Bad in order to look forward to the Good. Love is beautiful, yet also terrible. Love is peaceful, yet also disastrous. Love is brilliant, yet also obscure.

To support my claim if Love is terrible, if Love is disastrous, if Love is obscure why do people still love? If Love seems like the most hideous thing amongst everything, why is it then considered as the most powerful tool in the whole existence of everything? I have come up with a generalization that this is because To Love is a Choice, not a Feeling.

Because despite the Bad, there is the Good to look forward to. Despite Love causing pain, Love can still cause comfort. Despite Love causing sorrow, Love can still cause joy. This is because even when Love is imperfect, people love because people look forward to the Good that Love possesses. And if people loved only because they felt it, they would only feel hurt, rejected, heartbroken, and miserable. If people loved only because they felt it, then ‘love’ would seem too much of a misnomer for ‘loving’.

If people loved only because they felt it, that would mean people loved only because of the Good times. People would have loved only because their significant other sent them flowers on Valentine’s Day, or because they bought them the most expensive ring or brought them to a thousand-dollar worth of date.

Humankind is naturally imperfect. And like Love, it is imperfect. Humankind makes mistakes, yet it is capable of being the most beautiful thing ever to exist. Now, we can rephrase that: Love makes mistakes, yet it is capable of being the most beautiful thing to exist.

Now, why do people still love despite the Bad of it? It is because the people who love make it their decision to. To love is an everyday choice that one has to make, but far different from an obligation, people choose to love out of their own will, without expecting anything in return that is true love.

To love is an everyday choice that one has to make; when things are not as sweet as usual, when things are not as magical as usual, and when things are not as ‘loving’ as they usually feel like. To love is an everyday choice one makes; fixing things even when things are hard, making an effort despite one’s pride, and loving despite any conditions.

II. B. History of the Phenomenon

Lee (1973) offers a theory of love styles or types of lovers derived from an analysis of writings about love through the centuries. He offered one type of lover that would completely satisfy the selflessness of love. ‘Agape’ is an altruistic, selfless love. These partners give of themselves without expecting anything in return. Such a lover places the partners happiness above their own and is self-sacrificing to benefit the partner.

In this case, selfless love means putting the needs, desires, and sometimes, the wants of the person you love ahead of your own— whether it hurts, is painful, or you get nothing out of it for yourself. However, loving someone selflessly means that you make decisions based not on what you want, but on what is best for the one you love.

As I wander new paths and open new chapters of my life, my idea of love has become more fluid. Way back I thought of love as simply finding the ideal partner for you. A significant other that possesses your dreamed traits and characteristics, but this was contrasted by my experience of unexpectedly falling in love with someone who was very opposite from my ideal partner thereupon thinking that love is accepting the flaws of each other rather than forcing them to be one whom you wanted them to be.

Here we debunk the dominance of one and keep the equality of both. Just like what Dy has written, ‘If love is not to become domination, it must be balanced by a certain respect, respect for the uniqueness and otherness of the other. ‘Respect not in the sense of being weak and self-forgetting but the feeling of admiring your better half for his real nature. In the beginning was in the midst of doubt –Why him? and as I was gobbled by the uncertainty. I unconsciously dictated him to acquire my own disposition which consequently resorted to conflict. Representing respect for one another will probably sustain the felicity and peace between the heart of the two.

This has led me to the idea that the origin of being in love may have been rooted in the search for happiness. But love should not be equated with happiness for according to Dr. Paul Dolan’s ‘Will Love Make You Happy?’ Love is a lot more than a feeling. By reviewing what love has meant to people throughout history and across cultures, researchers offer a definition of love containing four key components:

The beloved. To love someone, there must be someone to love.
The feelings that accompany love. These can be sexy feelingsor not.
The thoughts that accompany love. You think about the beloved. Being with them, how they are, and so on.
The actions or relations one has with the beloved. Again, these can be sexy actionsor not.

Although these components of love differ in how they are manifest across time and place, they have all been present in some form when people describe love. (Dolan 2015 Psychology Today)

My parent’s 18 years of marriage have undergone a lot of challenges. When I was 6 years old, I still remember them fighting because my father cheated on my mother. I had already started to question Love then. I had doubts if Love really looked like how it did in the movies. Or how it did in photos. Or how it did in songs. Because as young as 6 years old, I doubted Love.

Recently, my father had cheated on my mother again. I do not want to go into further details, but I can say that I hated seeing my mother being so heartbroken. Yet all she did was love. Again, I doubted Love. Love did not look as magical as the movies have shown. Nor as beautiful in books. Nor as amazing as in songs.

Now that I have matured enough, I realize that it was Love, but I just did not see this form of Love. As my claim suggests, Love is not perfect. Rather, Love is both the Good and the Bad. Just like Life, it requires the Bad in order to look forward to the Good. Love is beautiful, yet also terrible. Love is peaceful, yet also disastrous. Love is brilliant, yet also obscure.

I asked my mother why she was still with my father despite how terrible, how disastrous, how obscure Love had been to her. She said, ‘Mahal ko eh. 17 years ko siyang nakasama, in-imagine ko pa nga na tatanda kaming magkasama. Love na love ko si papa mo.’ Then I realized it. Love is a Choice, not a feeling. People do not stay only because of how good it feels, but also because of how bad it goes sometimes.

As a personal experience, I had been in several relationships, but my last one had torn me apart the most (which I won’t go into much detail about). He was my first real love among all the others I have been with. I knew because he made it so hard for me to continue loving him. He made me feel unappreciated, led me on, and had other girls behind my back that I did not know about. Yet despite this, I chose to love him. Despite my doubts telling me that our relationship was toxic, I loved it.

I chose to love him, despite anything anyone had ever said. Despite any doubts that I had. I loved it because it was my decision to. That’s when I knew that I really did Love him. Because even if he made me feel unloved, it didn’t matter. I loved him. I gave Love, and that was my only intention. I did not even look forward to receiving it back. I loved it because I chose to.

III. C. Commonality of the Study

When we selflessly love people, we accept their flaws and shortcomings more readily. Selfless love accepts that ups and downs are a part of the journey and that the downs are better off when love is there, anyway.

These circumstances between two parties happen evidently in todays society. The fact that love is way more complex than we feel makes this phenomenon more frequent.

According to the Agape Love Counseling Module, ‘Love arises from the concept of unconditional Love’, According to Psych Central, ‘Staying in Love takes a Commitment.’ According to HuffPost, ‘real love is an unconditional commitment to an imperfect person.’

All of these support my claim that Love is a Choice, not a Feeling. Several other studies have been conducted to reveal what love truly is. Not all people have the same idea as I do, but I have had enough experiences to prove my claim true but not enough to generalize it. Besides, not all people go through the same difficulties as others. Their idea of love may differ from mine.

But in most cases, I do think that Love is a Choice; a commitment. And that nobody stays just because it ‘feels good’.

IV. Conclusion

It is really in nature to seek for what is real in the midst of all the contradicting claims. Just what we did in search of the true essence of love. Hence, my phenomenology focuses on love as a thing founded on respect and the search for happiness. As I have mentioned above any interpretation of love no matter how complex a viewpoint what matters is that it is related to one’s life.

In reiteration, To Love is a Choice, not a Feeling. Despite Love having Bad qualities, it does not make it impossible for it to be beautiful. Rather, it is our choice to make it as beautiful as we want to.

As Frederick Douglass: Our destiny is largely in our hands. Hence, it is what we make it to be. Love is beautiful, and it is my choice, my perspective to make it that way. I will leave the readers with Plato’s words: Love is a desire for the perpetual possession of the good. (Plato, 1951)

May it be known that even if Love causes several things that are Bad, we as humans, ultimately still seek for it because we are always drawn to what is Good.

Bibliography

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