Pastel Love or Madness
Every year when Valentine’s Day rolls around, I have flashbacks to elementary school where every square inch of wall surface was covered in pink hearts, and where truly silly amounts of time and energy were devoted to sharing shallow expressions of puppy love with classmates of whom I had next-to-no serious knowledge. I am sure the teachers thought it was a completely comical ironic exercise, but we kiddos didn’t know enough to realize it was ironic. Indiscriminate distribution of pastel pink hearts and pithy I-LOVE-YOUs was our first (and very formative) indoctrination into the shallow version of love.
Well, for this year’s Valentine’s Day I want to shake us all awake from our ironic elementary-school Pastel Trance. The best way to do that is to give you a glimpse of what Mad Love looks like. To that end, I offer this condensed excerpt from an essay called Love and the Individual by the very special Martha Nussbaum:
A person’s true self is uniquely defined by the values and virtues they care most deeply about. The best form of passion for that person is a response to those values and virtues, because those are the enduring essence of the person. We can imagine such a person losing their money, their reputation, their youthfulness – and still being essentially the same person, defined by those values and virtues. We cannot in the same way imagine them ever ceasing to care about those values and virtues. To love a person’s deepest values and virtues in this way is to love them as their eternal self, not as various accidental or ephemeral features.
Finding values and virtues that inspire you to love someone in this way will be rare, but when it happens you cannot miss it. You are simply, mysteriously struck by the splendor of the other person. You are dazzled, aroused, illuminated. You are nourished by the presence of the other’s beauty and excellence, their radiance as a committed soul.
Awe and wonder are the essential elements of this highest sort of passionate love.
And then she administers the coup de grace: this sort of love must be mutual.
What!? You mean, not only must I find someone with extraordinary virtues that inspire me, but I must also manifest virtues that simultaneously inspire them? Seriously? Yes, seriously that is her recipe for mad, passionate love. Perhaps I should have warned you in advance to beware unsolicited gifts from philosophers.
I wish you the kind of passionate love described by Martha. I wish that you demand for yourself an inspiringly beautiful dance partner in life, and I wish you the strength to manifest beauties of soul so powerful you evoke a harmonic passion in them. Because, as she also wrote in that same essay…
This sort of mad passion is an essential part of the best human life.
Have a truly passionate week!
Scott