LOVE

[HOPE]

Salam all,

Happy Valentine's Day!

Saint Valentine, God, and Godiva

By Inas Younis


The first rule of love is, “marriage is no real excuse for not loving.” Rule number two, “he who is not jealous cannot love.” And lastly, “when made public, love rarely endures.” Translation; love your spouse, be jealous, don’t tell anyone.

Those were the love rules according to 12th century author of The Art of Courtly Love,  Andreas Capellanus.  Nowadays, love is not to be hidden but to be heavily advertised, so much so that we have codified our public displays of affection in the form of a holiday, popularly known as Valentine’s Day.

I believe that love and lust are constants. They do not increase or decrease depending on a particular time in history. They merely go in or come out of the proverbial closet. In the 12th century, people were far more secretive about romantic love and for good reason. Love of the flesh was considered incompatible to spiritual growth. People who shun romantic love, did so to demonstrate their commitment to God. But thank God, this is no longer the conventional wisdom.

Modern man has not only codified love but has quantified it. How much do you love me, let me count the ways: a car, a house, a cashmere blouse. Love’s currency is clear. We are obsessed with measurable values because we want to ensure that even our relationships become an asset and not a liability.

But employing a quantifiable standard of measurement for love is as worthless a standard of measurement as counting the number of prostrations a man makes to measure his commitment to God. The consequence of our commoditization of romance is universally apparent.

These days, when a man says he is on a quest for love, you can be sure that it is self-esteem he is after, which he discovers in three sizes, 2, 4, and 6. And when a woman says she is on a quest for love, be sure its self-esteem she is about to betray, which she does via Visa, MasterCard, or American Express.  As French writer Andre Maurois once noted, “An unsatisfied woman requires luxury, but a woman who is in love with a man will lie on a board.”

He speaks the truth, but do not thank God for romantic love’s depreciation in value. Thank modern day’s prominent psychologist and author, Erich Fromm, who wrote the following description of love in his book, The Art of Loving:

“The sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one’s own possibilities for exchange…..The object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value..”
And then he goes on to say that people should fall in love:
“When they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values.”

And when a woman says she is on a quest for love, be sure its self-esteem she is about to betray, which she does via Visa, MasterCard, or American Express.

Eric Fromm essentially reduced love to a business transaction by assigning man a market value. And apparently he is not the only one who is cynical about love. A group in Japan is planning a protest in Tokyo on Valentine’s Day 2015, complaining that it’s just a money making ploy by “oppressive chocolate capitalists.” And the Saudis, who were the first to chime in on this matter,  banned the color red, and sent out the religious police to chocolate stores,  warning their proprietors against selling anything red or heart shaped which might be linked to the annual pagan holiday, Valentine’s Day.

So why is love so controversial and what exactly is romantic love?
Romantic love is the most intense emotion one can experience. It is an affirmation of one’s spiritual values, because only a person with spiritual values can recognize value in another. Sure, there are values in the secular realm, one can value hard work, money and status, and there is nothing wrong with having those values so long as they exist as a natural extension of one's religious values and not in opposition to them. A person with spiritual values does not permit an intense biological need to override a mild psychological distaste. A person with spiritual values would rather be alone than desperate, and would choose deprivation over desensitization.

And once a man of this caliber finds love, he can and will, face down the world and conquer it (metaphorically speaking) all in defense of the object of his desire. Because in defending her, he is defending his own values which he realizes can have no meaning without this particular, specific, irreplaceable person in his life. And this is what love in action looks like, which is the only way one can define love. Love as an abstraction is relative and therefore meaningless.


A group in Japan is planning a protest in Tokyo on Valentine’s Day 2015, complaining that it’s just a money making ploy by “oppressive chocolate capitalists.”

Apparently St. Valentine agrees with me. There are many convoluted accounts of the origins of Valentine’s Day,  but for the benefit of making my point more clearly, I am going to stick to the most widely held version of the story of Saint Valentine, which goes something like this:
Once upon a time, Claudius the Roman emperor, made a decision to ban marriage among young people because he concluded that unmarried soldiers fight better than married ones.  With the Roman Empire in danger of falling, he was not about to take any chances with love getting in the way. And so a priest named Valentine enters the scene with the explicit mission to save romantic love. He believed that marriage is a God given right and a holy sacrament, and so he decides to start officiating marriages in secret. He is eventually found out, imprisoned and beheaded. Saint Valentine, a celibate priest, gave his life to preserve the sanctity of love as an emotion worthy of being framed within the sacred vows of marriage. He thought more about the value of love than he did of an entire Empire.

Will you be my Valentine might have been a code for will you marry me. But today’s code words for love come courtesy of Hallmark and a man who wants to really nourish his emotions might feel cheapened by the psychological coercions and pressure to make a public display of his feelings.
Surely, there are values in the secular realm, one can value hard work, money and status, and there is nothing wrong with having those values so long as they exist as a natural extension of one's religious values and not in opposition to them.

Are we not cheapening the value of love by publicizing it?  Is 12th century Andreas Capellanus right about not telling anyone?  Love should be private, because romantic love is sacred and rare. It should be hidden, not because there is something to hide but because love is something worth preserving.  People used to risk their lives to make love, now we risk the potential and possibility of love to make a life; a proper socially acceptable life, preferably the kind that fits in a box; just like Godiva chocolates.

As for whether or not we should celebrate Valentines Day, there is no right or wrong answer.  Most Muslims and Jews give mixed views ranging from an active renunciation of anything which has religious connotations, to celebrating it with all the enthusiasm of teenage heart throbs.  And although there is really no biblical basis for Valentine’s Day, many Christians celebrate it the way they would any other national holiday.

So in 2015, rather than use the ‘everyday is Valentine’s day’ loophole, tell her a bedtime story. Remind her that once upon a time, a saint named Valentine risked his life so that people in love can be together. And so, commemorate the day not by replaying the flowers and chocolate routine but by praying together and long live love!