eros and agape.

To many, love is passion.

Love is power.  Love is strength.  It is an explosion of endorphins, a means of security and validation, and it is a support column.  Love is an excuse for people to do stupid things just as it is a reason for people to do mighty things.  Some argue that “love” is their religion, their way of life in a world of poor and broken people.  Some speak love with their words, some show love by their actions.  While these descriptions of love are legit, “love” continues to be something we misunderstand and misconceptualize too often in the world.

Don’t get me wrong: I totally believe in love.  What compels me to write about love is not my unbelief of love but rather, recent conversations, thoughts, and scenarios that have motivated me to share a few of my own convictions.  Neither will I profess to be an expert on love nor will I pretend to have a lot of knowledge in this area, but rather, I will attempt to give a fresh perspective on something that touches all people and all things in this world.  As a college student in her senior year, I’ll be the first to admit that there are many other older and wiser folks who are much more fluent in the language of love than I will ever be at this point in life – age notwithstanding, this is what I have to offer.  As always, comments and criticisms are welcome!

But first, a little background.  I grew up in an environment where love was conditional and rewarded to me if I successfully produced a good grade, good behavior, achievement, and perfection.  To me, love was a weighted and subjective transfer of goods.  It was earned.  On the occasion that I could not produce anything worthy of love, I was slammed, rejected, put down, and threatened.  I began to process “love” on a system of fear, where I would make decisions based on the fear of losing favor in someone else’s eyes; losing priority and standing in someone else’s life, and with that, significance.  This misguided system of “love” transpired in every aspect of my life, particularly as I began my first serious relationship in college.  Like most girls, I equated “love” with “security” in such that part of me believed my value and ability to be loved could be validated if a guy told me I was beautiful and worth it.  But because my understanding of love was founded upon fears, the relationship did not grow and eventually ended in a very painful breakup.  To be fair, I was not alone in my warped system of love, as he struggled too to understand love in his own personal way.  To make a long story short, the journey I then took afterward was a hard one in which a deconstruction of my understanding of “love” began to occur.  In the midst of that experience, I gained a new awareness of myself and of others.  It is still a process, in which I continually tear down the distorted conceptions of love (e.g., “he’ll love me if I give him what he wants,” “he’ll love me if I look more perfect or beautiful,” etc.) and allow a bigger perception of love to redefine what is and what isn’t true.

This should sound familiar to all of you collegians out there.  Some of you are entering significant relationships.  Some of you are parting ways after spending a summer together.  Some of you are in or have been in relationships that are entering the second, third, fourth or fifth year (or more) — you’ve seen it all, the fights and the arguments, the pseudo breakups and the many “I’m sorry”s and “I love you”s exchanged.  Some of you are emerging into a new phase of life: recently graduated, hard hit with reality and the uncertainty of the future; every question imaginable within your line of vision: what will happen to us?  Will we make it through this one?  Is he as serious about me as I am with him?  Does she really love me?  Can I trust her?  Do we love each other enough?

Maybe you haven’t been in a relationship.  Perhaps it is something you desire so much that you are daily consumed by the want to be loved and to be pursued.  You are tired of having your patience tested, particularly when all of your friends are engaged or married.  But maybe a relationship is something you don’t want to experience at the moment, or ever.  You’ve got other plans for your life; you want to go to med school or law school and you don’t need any distractions right now.  Regardless of where you stand, this is still directed at you.

The truth is, you can choose to see what you want to see in someone just as you can be something that someone else wants to see.  Before you know it, you are dating an empty shell with a depth you never want to know.  That person was who you wanted them to be and never who they really were instead.  You can spend two, three, seven or ten years with someone who you really don’t love and who really doesn’t love you.  But you won’t realize it until much later, when you wish that you could take back the things you’ve done or said that have made irrevocable etches on their heart.

The truth is, you can search high and low for the right man or woman to spend the rest of your life with just as you can spend the rest of your life with who you think is the right man or woman and never know love the way it was meant to be perceived.  You can let your heart become embittered because you have no lover right now just as you can let your heart be aggravated because the lover you are currently with knows exactly how to push your buttons.

So you’re scared that they’ll eventually meet someone else they will actually love and want to spend the rest of their life with.  So you’re scared that he’ll cheat on you; you’re scared that you actually can’t trust her like you wish you could.  So you’re scared that you will never find “the one,” scared that you’ll never be happily married.  Humans are so delicate, like glass-blown figurines in an antique armoire.  We are too easily broken, too easily shattered, and too easily begrimed.

Our definition and understanding of love is too small.  It’s dull, it’s bland, and it’s insufficient.  It’s the kind of definition that settles.  Let me say it this way.  We SETTLE for inadequate definitions of love.  The truth is, even the purest of all eros relationships barely even brush the surface of love at its finest…

Love is made up of choices.  More than it is made up of chemical pathways, dopamine-induced rushes, chocolate and roses.  While eros love can be a feeling, agape love covers over all.  Agape chooses to know no boundaries.  Agape is choosing to be a part of something greater than yourself.  It is choosing to give yourself up for another, for a cause that is bigger than life.  Agape chooses to lose a part of yourself — only to gain it back times a hundred.  This kind of love requires you to give someone the benefit of the doubt; it requires you to believe and to hope even when it hurts.  It requires you to choose forgiveness over guilt-trips; humility over anger; vulnerability over masked emotions; a clean record over a tally of how you’ve been wronged.  This kind of love knows no games.  It knows no impurities.  It accepts and does not reject; it gives even when it is not returned; it bleeds for you even if you do not want it to touch you.

Being born on Earth automatically implies that you can expect to be heartbroken and disenchanted; it implies that sooner or later, someone you love will let you down and invade your sense of security and purpose.  It implies that, the very second you give your heart away, you can expect to be bruised.  But being born on Earth also implies that you are offered to experience agape love, though not by any human means.  It is available to you through the very author and giver of Love.  And you can take it today.

Okay.  I have to go to class.