Love is Love

Mr Holdsworth looks at love and its definition in a Catholic sense.

If you press someone for a coherent definition on what #love is, it usually follows a thread something like this: they’ll start by insisting that love is a feeling - it’s an intense attraction towards someone or something. But there’s an array of problems and inconsistencies with this definition. The first is that, we don’t control our feelings or our moods. Today I might be in the mood to get up early, exercise, and be productive, but tomorrow, I may not feel like that. My feelings on the matter are inconsistent and therefore, incoherent. What I ought to do should be based one my reason.

And, we insist that love is a noble and even virtuous thing. But how can something so noble, be the by-product of something we have no control over? How can we say that we admire someone for the extent of their love and be critical of someone who lacks love for their neighbor, when, if it’s only a feeling of intense attraction, neither can be held accountable for their surplus or deficit of this feeling? If we’re going to insist on admiring or criticizing people for the amount of love that they exhibit, then we have to admit that there is a dimension of choice involved in what it means to love or not love. Because it is the choices and actions of others that we admire, not their mood swings.

The second problem with this definition, is that it leads to absurdities when applied in real life. For example, what do you call someone who has intense feelings of attraction to someone else who doesn’t reciprocate those feelings. Umm… a stalker. It’s not an admirable thing when someone relentlessly expresses such intense feelings of infatuation when they aren’t mutual. Or on an even darker level, what about an adult who has intense feelings of physical attraction for children. I don’t know if society is actually this far gone yet, but I’d like to think that most of us wouldn’t call that love. So, you might want to amend your definition to something like, intense feelings of attraction that are welcomed and reciprocated. But, we can still run into trouble here because what if a minor reciprocates intense feelings to an adult – like a student and a teacher. Is that love? And don’t we all know someone who has been swept up in a very intense romance with someone that was also quite abusive? Relationships like that can hardly be described as a consequence of love, at least not the kind of love that is worthy of admiration. The only definition that I’ve ever heard that I find satisfying in that it can be applied to all the various instances that we might, seriously, describe as love, just so happens to be the Catholic definition. According to it, love is willing the good of another. #loveislove #catholicpride Podcast Version: https://brianholdsworth.libsyn.com/