The phenomenon called “Love” is everywhere and everyone has his or her own experiences to state on how good it feels to fall in love. There have been odes, phrases, thoughts and a lot of interpretations on the term “love”, the most common being referring it to be an intense feeling or a state of emotion. It is quoted by many to be an impulse that follows from the depth of the heart with clearly no role for the brain to play. The widespread belief amongst human species that fall in this popular experience known as “Love” is that it incites the mind to do all the moves that portray affection, intimacy and reciprocation towards the opposite/same sex. However, when we try to dig out the source of love between two individuals, we most often end up with weird and ambiguous justifications. If love is claimed to be an emotion or state of mind, so is anger, laughter and crying. The latter states of mind can be validated to be an immediate outcome of some provocation, but a similar conclusion cannot be derived about the former, thereby challenging the coherence of love as a feeling. So, if love is not a feeling, what is it and how does it happen?
The right way to understand the term “Love” is to consider it as less of a feeling and more of a habit. Most of you might have already started to think that associating love to be a habit sounds unconventional. In a way it is, but it cannot be deemed as incorrect, now that categorizing it as a feeling doesn’t make sense and in the end I am sure that we can come to amicable terms with whatever is established. To start with, we can eliminate the concept of “Love at first sight”. It makes no sense at all. Love at first sight is an uncertainty. I say that because a sane individual cannot speculate that he/she will be able to sustain, what he/she assumes to be love on the very first encounter, from a long term perspective. Moreover, the probability of the success of a life long commitment as a result of the first confrontation is very negligible, to be frank, nil. This uncertainty is known to the common man as infatuation which is a short term gamble that can have adverse effects in an unfavorable event. So as a smart investor in love, it is not worth investing your time and money on an event as risky as “Love at first sight”. Hence it makes sense to evade discussing something that is baseless.
The right way to understand the term “Love” is to consider it as less of a feeling and more of a habit. Most of you might have already started to think that associating love to be a habit sounds unconventional. In a way it is, but it cannot be deemed as incorrect, now that categorizing it as a feeling doesn’t make sense and in the end I am sure that we can come to amicable terms with whatever is established. To start with, we can eliminate the concept of “Love at first sight”. It makes no sense at all. Love at first sight is an uncertainty. I say that because a sane individual cannot speculate that he/she will be able to sustain, what he/she assumes to be love on the very first encounter, from a long term perspective. Moreover, the probability of the success of a life long commitment as a result of the first confrontation is very negligible, to be frank, nil. This uncertainty is known to the common man as infatuation which is a short term gamble that can have adverse effects in an unfavorable event. So as a smart investor in love, it is not worth investing your time and money on an event as risky as “Love at first sight”. Hence it makes sense to evade discussing something that is baseless.
That alleviates us to understand and make ceterus paribus assumptions for the moment that love is a long term commitment between two individuals who have vowed to be with each other in times of happiness and disparities। In other words, the outcome is known but the origin is undefined.
Moving forward, we try to establish a source to the occurrence of love from the point when two individuals meet. The first phase begins when they spend time together as friends. Initially either one of them is not resilient which interests them into entering the second phase, which is the part when they try to know each other. What starts as a pretty formal conversation gradually gets personal and as they talk, they get to share their opinions and ideas about events and stuff happening around them. They improvise on their conversational skills to know their interests and turn offs better. This automatically leads them to the third phase – the frequent phone calls and informal meetings. Now this stage is what I believe the turning point as in the process of making their friendship stronger, they unknowingly become susceptible to a relationship which is beyond the purview of friendship. They are bound by an attachment which they haven’t discovered at this stage. Longer duration of talks and frequently seeing each other makes them habituated to each other prompting them to take their present relationship to the next level. The fourth phase that follows as a result is obvious. This is the phase wherein both individuals set out to get intimate with each other as they believe that their behavior at this point is not at all outlandish. Thereafter, they perceive their relationship to be love and hold it responsible for all prospective events that occur between them. This relationship grows so stronger with time that the mere thought of separation haunts their minds.
Practically when we study this situation, we can observe a failure on their part to identify that all events that take place between them cannot be accounted to any feeling or emotion but it is the consequence of a prolonged togetherness between the two. A habit, as we all know, is also a human instinct of being regular to an event or act that occurs automatically without thinking about its morality. Now if that is what we mean of the term “habit”, then how different is love from it?
