26 June

I remember asking a few years ago what people think ‘love’ means. Nearly universally they agreed with this, that it’s a feeling. Usually they described it as an enhanced form of friendship or affection. Probably not a surprise in a culture where the ‘feels’ is so dominant. Love is not a feeling. Feelings have no independent existence, but one of the defining things about our culture is that we think they do. What we *feel* as love is love acting, sure, but the feeling is not love. I say love is the encounter with somebody who is different to you, where those specific differences cause a type of existential ‘spark’. The spark excites you, makes you feel alive. It’s entirely different to friendship, which is a very shallow, superficial relationship by comparison. Friendship binds like being fans of a football team binds. It’s about sameness, imitation. Love is about difference, and the sparks it produces. Also why so many relationships fail, they start with the spark, but they’re unable to maintain it because the desire for ‘fidelity’ (in the broadest meaning of that term, the desire for sameness, not just about sex) overpowers the desire for difference, for the spark.