Love Is An Interpretation

As suggested by sex is near, love is far, it seems that we don’t directly feel romantic love. Instead, we rather abstractly interpret our feelings as being love or not, depending on whether we think our relation fits our abstract ideal of love:

When adult women were asked about love and how they have experienced love in their own lives, … many women found it difficult to talk about their feelings generally and love in particular. There was an absence of falling in love stories and rather, women explained that they ‘drifted’ into relationships, or they ‘just happened’. …

Love continues to be used as the legitimating ideology for family, relationships and marriage. Moreover, the representation of love in society is omnipresent; it is depicted in blockbuster films, on daytime television, in novels, in music and in numerous other cultural formats. This ‘commercialization’ of love has commonly captured a specific form of love: one which promises salvation for both sexes, although perhaps more so for women. …

Love was mentioned often by the 23 young, mostly heterosexual (one woman identified as bisexual), adult women with whom this paper is concerned. Yet, the context in which love was mentioned was almost always in relation to abstract discussions about relationships and marriage. Romantic discourses were shunned in favour of pragmatic, objective assessments of emotion. When I asked them to tell me about their own relationships they often seemed to struggle to put their feelings into words and there was a distinct absence of falling in love stories. These women did not openly desire love and many accounts of relationships were based on ‘drifting’ into relationships with friends or finding that love ‘just happened’. …

Eleanor commented, ‘about a month ago I suddenly woke up and I just thought I’m in love with you. And I thought I was before that point but I just woke up and I just knew’. … The absence of love stories is documented in participants’ use of cover stories, metaphors and a ‘drift’ discourse. Yet when asked directly about love, respondents did not shy away from talking about their feelings. …

Narratives of whirlwind romances were rare but the significance and meaning of love, as well as the romantic image of ‘the one true love’, led the respondents to define love in a very specific way. Thus it was common for them to denounce the love they felt in past relationships in the form of ‘I thought it was love . . .’. Michelle was a good example of this: ‘I thought I was in love with him and in hindsight it was quite an inappropriate [relationship]’. Michelle later ‘realizes’ that it was not love at all. (Carter, 2013; ungated)

That is, these women don’t see love in the details of how their relations started or grew. At some point they just decide they are in love. Later, if they change how they think about the relation, they may change their mind about if they were in love. So if they feel love, it is a feeling attached to and drawn mostly from an abstract interpretation of a situation, rather than from particular concrete details. Love is far indeed.