Where's the love?

Young people are afraid of making commitments, and the point is that love is commitment, and much more. Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication. Commitment is gratuitous, motiveless, because the real passions are all low and selfish. One may be sexually attracted, but that does not, so people think, provide a sufficient motive for real and lasting concern for one another.

Part of the inability to make a commitment results from an ideology of the feelings. There is so much jealousy and possessiveness among people that the fear of getting hurt or losing someone has killed any motive for real and lasting concern. Moreover, the emphasis of authenticity in life has made it impossible to trust one’s own instinct. Why should a man or a woman be jealous if his or her partner has sex with someone else? A serious person today does not want to force the feelings of others. The same goes for possessiveness. The result is disassociation from commitment as well as from real love. It also makes me feel like I am living in a world of robots.

This ideology only works for people who have no experience of the feelings, have never loved, have abstracted from the texture of life. These people will never fear Othello’s fate. Kill for love! What can that mean? It may very well be that their distance is a suppression of feelings, an anxiety about getting hurt. But it also might be the real thing. People may have developed a new kind of soul. The availability of sexual possibilities is nothing new to today’s generation. But their lack of passion, hope and despair is incomprehensible to me.

“Relationships,” not love affairs, are what people have. Love suggests something wonderful, exciting, positive and firmly seated in the passions. A relationship is gray, amorphous, suggestive of a project, without a given content, and tentative. You work at a relationship, whereas love takes care of itself. In a relationship the difficulties come first, and there is a search for common ground. Love, on the other hand, is an illusion of perfection to the imagination and is forgetful of all the natural fissures in human connection.

I’m not saying that these people will be unable to live happy lives. But their conception of love cannot provide the soul with images of the beautiful, and it will remain coarse and slack. It is not that they will fail to adorn or idealize the world; it is that they will not see what is really there.