The Corruption of Love

We have to re-learn what it means to love

At some point, we forgot what it means to actually love. It’s a trite cliché now to talk about Disney and Hollywood and Bollywood’s role in corrupting the idea of love – of presenting it as a powerful, fairytale emotion that whisks the lover away into a garden of ecstatic happiness. Love became synonymous with pleasure in every way: joy in the heart and sexual experience in the body – ecstasy of both body and mind.

And, yet, I don’t blame Disney or Hollywood or Bollywood or, God help us all, Lollywood. I don’t blame romance novels and silly TV shows and hallmark movies. I don’t blame TikTok (though you should never get relationship advice from TikTok), Instagram, or YouTube. I don’t blame “capitalism” or the modality of the reality of the particularity of the decoloniality of individuality (or whatever else nonsensical academic word-salad you can come up with).

No, the deep-rooted philosophy of godlessness that permeates through the modern mind makes our societies almost incapable of serious love.

I blame Kant and John Stuart Mill, Hobbes and Rousseau. I blame the emphasis of humanism to begin with the human and remove God from the equation. When you remove God as the fundamental assumption of all existence, you strip love from all of its power. In a universe with God as its center, love is the very purpose of life, because life is lived to love God. In a world devoid of God, love is almost madness, a curiosity to be explained because it makes little sense.

To the humanist, love is always selfish. Love might be a social contract, a document signed by all people to ensure that we can selfishly and securely make use of one another by a series of transactions. Or love might emanate from self-love: I love myself, so I must love others who are like myself. Or love might be a powerful feeling of joy and happiness, and so it is good because joy and happiness are good feelings. But how different – and how utterly beautiful and majestic! – the love that’s loved when God is centered.

When the purpose of existence is to love God, then love is the very central emotion of the entire moral universe. It has a distinct purpose created by an intentional Creator. To love is to blur the very lines of being, to remove the barriers between our very selfhood and attach it with the selfhood of another. To love is to be one but many simultaneously; to love is to be in a single voice in complete harmony with a celestial chorus. To love is to be human and to transcend one’s humanity.

When we see love from this perspective and bring it back to the love between lovers, we recognize that love is not loved for the joy and happiness and pleasures of sex. Love is loved because love is holy, sacred, sacrosanct. And, so, love endures even when the joy and happiness and pleasure is not present. Love becomes the purpose – not the consequence. It is joy and pleasure that become secondary, whereas love is primary.

So what happens to love in a godless culture? It becomes inherently selfish. “If he loved me, he would be perfect in his love for me.” “If she loved me, she wouldn’t do things that hurt me.” Every pain becomes an excuse to run from love; every grief and hurt and frustration becomes a reason to end love. Imperfection is untolerated; adjustment and compromise are unwanted; hard work to maintain love is seen as a deficiency of the love to begin with.

But a blacksmith can only be a good blacksmith when his swords perform well on the battlefield; and a lover can only be a good lover when he loves well in life. And just as the beginner blacksmith makes mistakes, is imperfect in his craft, and grows over time; so, too, the lover stumbles and fumbles as he tries to learn the craft of love. When we turn love into a selfish enterprise, we don’t tolerate the growing pains of a lover learning to love; we assume that he’s just a deficient lover.

Love is joy; love if pain. Love is ecstasy; love is grief. But, most of all, love is mutual generosity. It is determination to be sincere in intention and effort knowing full well that I will fail in my attempts at love; and it is accepting that the other will be sincere in intention and effort knowing that they will fail in their attempts at love. And, most of all, in a universe where God is the center, all love is sacred (as long as it is chaste!); even unrequited love is a blessing.

There is no shame in love that is imperfect, or love that is unrequited, or love that is loved and lost. There is no shame or guilt in loving deeply, sincerely, truly, chastely, and losing. There is no shame in loving someone who cared about us but couldn’t love us. There is no fault in love loved so imperfectly that it couldn’t sustain love. Because all love loved between humans is just practice; just as practice makes perfect, loving others makes our love more perfect.

It is all a prelude, the starting of the play, for when the truest of all loves is begun: the love between servant and master, created and creator, man and God. That is the purest of all loves. So, what shame have you for a failed love of another when it brought you to the success of loving the One, true beloved – God Himself.