Aside from figure of speech, what is this thing called love?

By Roger Martin

Special to The Capital-Journal

June is the month of brides, grooms, and love, sweet love. Emily Dickinson called love "the exponent of breath." If I remember my algebra, that means love is breath squared, breath cubed, breath to the power of 10, 100, 1,000!

But then comes the ticklish question: Once you get past the pretty figures of speech, what is this thing called love, anyway?

For months, a booklet has been drowning in the litter of my desktop, but now it can help answer the question.

Titled "Some Mysteries of Love," it contains the most recent Lindley Lecture in philosophy at The University of Kansas. Its author is Harry Frankfurt.

He's a professor of philosophy at Princeton University.

His words about love are cool ones. He writes: "Roughly speaking, love is a disinterested concern for the flourishing of what is loved." It is not, he says, infatuation, lust, obsession or dependency. The heart of it is not even feeling! It is volition and will.

So then what's the thing we call "falling in love" all about? Well, that's the work of speed --- a natural form of speed the body manufactures called phenylethylamine. In her book "A Natural History of Love," Diane Ackerman writes that when we fall in love, extra supplies of the chemical "whip the brain into a frenzy of excitement."

Unfortunately, the body develops a tolerance to phenylethylamine. So infatuation generally lasts only one to four years before the paint that we've so imaginatively applied to our beloved begins too peel.

Oh, no, it's a real person.

But the relationship doesn't have to die. For the fortunate ones, new brain chemicals --- pain-killers called endorphins, the body's version of morphine --- come on line. They provide peace, calm and security.

"The feeling is less steep than falling in love," Ackerman reports, "but it's steadier and more addictive."

Conflicts, of course, are inevitable. According to Frankfurt, one central conflict is that between a lover's devotion to his beloved and his devotion to other interests.

There are many other sources of distress, and in light of these, Frankfurt thinks we should be defensive and restrained about those whom we choose to love. That's a trick, given how compelling that falling-in-love feeling is.

So, once we plunge, how do we manage love?

I, for one, have failed often in love, which certainly qualifies me to speak about this. After selecting a partner with care (and forgiving ourselves our blunders) I think the trick of loving is to continue to care even as the phenylethylamine magic wears off, continue to care even after the disappointment that comes from the mutual discovery of flaws, continue to care despite the differences about values, activities and credit card use.

How do we continue? First, by training ourselves to listen to the other without interrupting and afterward to demonstrate, in a manner that convinces the other, that we have heard.

Second, by training ourselves to speak cautiously and directly and humbly: without lobbing hand grenades or taking covert jabs.

Easy to say, hard to do. If we succeed then the real love begins.

And if it does, that's a cause for celebration --- in June or any other month.

Roger Martin is communications coordinator for the KU Center for Research and editor of Explore:, a KU webzine at www.research.ukans.edu/explore/.

Copyright 2001
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