Something tells me that as soon as I start writing about love, I'm never going to stop. So here's to the possibility of my blog turning into one long drawn out rant about love
Love.... One of my very favorite things to talk about and least favorite things to experience. Just kidding. Sort of. But really, why would I ever want to be in love if I can study it safely from afar?
Just kiddddddddddding.
But there is something to say about that statement as far as love in concerned in psychological studies. The thing is, psychology has as an attitude of disengaged, objectiveness that ultimately will never result in a comprehensive understanding of human nature. I could talk forever about this too, but let’s stay on topic.
Most studies on love, however, while being scientific and revealing several important factors in understanding love, seem to be missing a large part of the experience of love; They focus on the “why” and “how” of love, rather than the experience itself. What makes people fall in love? What qualities are necessary for the feeling of love to occur? Several studies suggest the feeling of love is a product of biology; we feel love so we can pass our genes to the next generation. Others suggest love can be induced through arousal, or through gazing into another’s eyes for a period of time (this is actually a super funny study). Love has specific qualities and rules like equity and reciprocity and self-disclosure. But is that what we experience? And is that how we understand and live love in our day to day lives? I say no. So as the budding qualitative researcher that I am, I interviewed some people!
I interviewed five individuals about their experiences with romantic love in whatever way they chose to define it. The point was to illicit each individual’s story of what being in love meant to them and how they came to that conclusion as well as see what role the research on love played into that experience. From there, I was surprised by many of the answers and explanations I received, as they did not fit what I expected nor did they always fit the explanations of love we often read and studied. Instead, they encompassed many meanings and progressions of the same word in remarkably different but similar ways, none of which were static or permanent. Could it be that people’s experiences and what they mean and relationships between individuals are all important in understanding love?
Don’t be silly… that is not objective at all. Or measurable! What kind of science is that?
Answer: A better one! Or at least one that fills in the gaping holes.
In my experience, what love is has never been easy to pinpoint or reduce. Though I agree many of these concepts (like equity, disclosure, and friendship) are important in understanding love, I have never experienced love as a simply biological effect or an effect of my environment. My experience with love comes from values I’ve chosen to endorse and situations I’ve lived through. It’s easy to see how the other people I interviewed had value systems as well and assumed agency in their experiences. It is only through my experiences that I can explain what love means to me and how I know I was in love; to describe it in scientific terms would not be difficult but would also not capture the meaning of my experience. So why would psychology choose to ignore experience?
As it happens with most psychological areas of research, I think we try too hard to extract, reduce, objectify and manipulate the experience of love to figure out, once and for all, what it is. And yet, this approach ultimately ignores the meaning of the experience and assumes the best way to find the “is” of love is to take it apart and reduce it to a checklist of qualities and rules. On one hand we have the theories and should’s and ought’s of love, and on the other, we have the experience with all its flaws, biases and meanings that are put aside in search of some inherent “truth” that may or may not be there. We are told what love is supposed to do and be by various professionals, the media, and psychology, but I believe our experiences transcend these; they capture the reality of love better than any study that claims to be an objective. Perhaps finding the “truth” of love cannot be found by digging for underlying patterns, but lies in the meanings and contexts in which it is created. This is not to say that the research done is irrelevant or wrong but, maybe, we can better understand love by not seeking to extract it from where it happens….
Next post, I’ll talk about what people I interviewed have to say about love. In the mean time, read some poetry by Pablo Neruda (almost literally the God of love) and Us: Americans Talk About Love by John Bowe.
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