There’s a myth that pure, unadulterated (and adulterous) love is the most powerful force that motivates human action. The more passionate, the more powerful! By this standard, the person who gives himself over to force of feeling with abandon is the person who will love the best.
Is love just a feeling? There was a time when this was not the commonly held view, and professions of love were accompanied by years of tedious commitment and work. Those were just the sad old days of stricture from which we have been released. Now, love is our guide and love will prompt actions of splendor. Or so we are told. “Love is love”; “Make love not war”. This view has been decades in the making.
Lest we overstate our case, there is something true in the idea that love, whether ordered or disordered, is a powerful force. After all, Helen’s was the face that launched a thousand ships. However, there are features particular to our infatuation with “love” that are worth exploring.
It’s common to see lines such as “there’s nothing two people in love can’t do.” This is meant to imply the sublime heights to which they can climb and the harmony which they will enjoy, presumably, since it is stated as a positive. There’s another side to that coin, though.
Let us examine some evidence of what this passionate love can do. There’s an infamous case in a sleepy suburb south of Houston, in which a woman showed just what love is capable of. You might not expect two dentists to embroil themselves in a salacious saga, but even orthodontists can be people of great passion, apparently.
The story involves a husband and wife living the American dream with a jointly-owned chain of dental offices, a mansion, newborn twins arriving to 40-year-old parents, and by all accounts an enormously loving marriage in all the superficial ways.
There was trouble in paradise, it seems, when the husband took up with the new receptionist. Perhaps with growing suspicions, the wife hired on private investigators to shadow her husband. When she learned that he and the receptionist, a divorced mother of three, were carrying out a rendezvous at a local hotel, she drove by to see for herself.
The results of the ensuing confrontation were a melee between the wife and the other woman in the hotel lobby, which was predictable enough. But then, things didn’t end there. After the trio left the hotel, the wife hit the gas on a $70,000 Mercedes and circled the parking lot. With her husband’s child from a previous marriage in the passenger seat, the wife drove over her husband—repeatedly—until he was dead.
Love as a feeling is a powerful force. Unchained from reason and choice, it is not more powerful but less. It is perhaps more powerful in intensity but not in the ways that matter. Passionate love seeks to possess the other and in this objectification inhumanity can take hold. This possessiveness can unleash the desire to obliterate instead of losing.
When we say grandly that “love” can do so much, we should pause to consider the full range of what “love” can do. It is not in the realm of the natural and the innate that love will become self-sacrificing, patient, and mature. Unmoored from eternal things and the other virtues, we cannot rely on love to see us through.
