Prelude on Love & Hate

The crazy quilt pattern of our domestic arrangements raises questions about what love is and what it is not. In a time when human relationships have been dramatically transformed, it is no longer clear what love is, how long it lasts, when different loves collaborate or conflict, and to what degree people are brought together or split apart in the course of love.

What a change in family and love life there has been in the last 30 or 40 years! Back in 1970, 70.5 percent of all households had a married couple, and 85 percent of children resided with two parents. In the U.S. in 2000, 51 percent of the nation’s households contained a married couple, 23 percent of homes are married partners with their children, over a third of children are born out of wedlock, cohabitation and same sex unions are more prevalent, and individuals marry later. The divorce rate, which had skyrocketed in the 1970s, has declined in recent years; still, 28 percent of children are being raised by one parent, close to 60 percent of children live with both biological parents, and over ten percent of children live in blended families.

Love has conquered marriage, according to historian Stephanie Coontz, and the results are mixed (Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage [New York: Viking, 2005]). Coontz claims that in previous eras the foundation and stability of marriage was dependent on more than the feelings the married partners had for each other. Now love rules the way. When Coontz speaks of love in marriage, primarily she is referring to husband and wife, not parents and children. To

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her, many people are more fulfilled in marriage than ever before. Romance can still be volatile, and when it falters or fades, relationships may break up and marriages dissolve.

The hunger of parents for fulfilling romance may conflict with their love for their children. Seeking fulfillment in and through marriage is common. Should the marriage become dead, combative, or abusive, alternatives may be sought. When there is constant parental fighting or family violence, it will likely be in everyone’s interest to break the family up. Still, there is often difficulty in reconciling parental love and personal fulfillment in marriage. In marriage, care for one’s partner, commitment to one’s own life, and the well-being of the children may at times be in harmony and at other times at cross purposes. If it is the latter, choices between various commitments and concerns may conflict, with no easy choices available. Separation and loss often cause turmoil. When marriages break up, adults may recover from their divorces, or they may not. Many children of divorce and remarriage do well, but others have long-term emotional scars. In this age of divorce and blended families, adult love relationships do not always maintain themselves. The failure of adult love has consequences for the children.

Judith Wallerstein and her colleagues found that children from divorced and remarried families express more aggression toward their parents and teachers, are more depressed, have greater learning difficulties, and suffer from more problems with peers than children from intact families (Judith Wallerstein, Julia M. Lewis, and Sandra Blakeslee, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce [New York: Hypenon, 2000], p. xxiii). There are other psychosocial consequences of divorce and single parenting. “The chances that a white girl from an advantaged background,” report McLanahan and Sandefur, “will become a teen mother is five times as high, and the chances a white girl will drop out of high school is three times as high if the parents do not live together,” (Sara McLanahan and John Sandefur, Growing Up With a Single Parent [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994], p. 60).

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Regardless of race, sex, and previous marital status, Kay Hymowitz says, children of single mothers are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, to commit crimes, and to fail in school; they graduate from college less frequently; they are more likely to give birth at a young age and more likely to be unmarried when they do so (Kay Hymowitz, Marriage and Caste in America [Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006], p. 4).

However, the “major impact of divorce does not occur during childhood or adolescence. Rather, it rises in adulthood as serious romantic relationships move center stage,” Wallerstein and associates write. “Men and women from divorced families live in fear that they will repeat their parents’ history,” (Wallerstein, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, pp. xxix, 31). Often they do. Adult children of divorce, Paul Amato and Danielle DeBoer report, have double the divorce rate of those whose parents remained married (“The Transmission of Marital Instability Across Generations: Relationship Skills or Commitment to Marriage?” Journal of Marriage and Family 63 (4), pp. 1038-1051).

Marriage with children was once promoted as a haven from a heartless world. Family life can be the source of deepest comfort and belonging or become a battlefield in itself. There is a paradox: benevolence and acrimony, joy and destructiveness all emanate from the house of love. Many couples who likely married for love and care deeply for their children end up suffering themselves when the marital relationship falls apart and their children’s faith in the benevolence of others may be seriously undermined. The consequences of these broken relationships can either be lifelong or healable. How is love and destruction so closely connected? Marital and parental love can end up in the deepest conflict. If love has conquered marriage, and its results can cover such extremes, fundamental questions about the nature of this phenomenon become pressing. Those who want to understand love in our time must focus, in part, on where its conflicting loyalties play out: marriages with children.

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The very extremes of contemporary domestic arrangements raise very broad and difficult questions:

What is the nature of love? What are its psychological dynamics that cause such joy and pain, fulfillment and damage?

What are the various kinds of love? How are they similar, how do they diverge, and how can they conflict?

What sustains and what undermines love relationships? Is romantic love something with a lifetime warranty, a short shelf life, or an indeterminate length? Does love have developmental stages?

What are the dynamics of love between parents and children? What is the connection, if any, between love and marriage, or love and parenting? Where do marital and parental love connect and where do they conflict? What are the consequences for everyone concerned when marital or romantic love conflicts with parental love?

Psychoanalyst Stephen A. Mitchell in 2002 published a volume entitled Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance Over Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). A related question is whether these serial intimate relationships are really love or if they need some other name.

“We use the word love in such a sloppy way that it can mean almost nothing or absolutely everything,” writes poet and essayist Diane Ackerman (Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love [New York: Random House, 1994], p. xviii). Given the turmoil and fulfillment in relationships, where can we turn to get some clarity, to understand the nature of love and how its vicissitudes impact on the lives of adults and children?

What about the bards of love: poets, novelists and songwriters? Can they illuminate love’s fancies? Conflicting conceptions of romance are present in literature and song.

If Shakespeare set the standard, the instability of contempo-

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rary romance would not be called love. He writes:

“Love is not love

Which alters when it alternation finds
Or bends with the remover to remove
O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken”

(William Shakespeare, The Sonnets [New York: Penguin Books, 2001], Sonnet 116, p. 119). To Marvin Gaye, love is not as constant as Shakespeare contends:

“Love just comes and it goes
How long it’s gonna last nobody knows
That’s the way love is, baby.”

Love, to some, brings union and happiness. D. H. Lawrence presents romance as a glorious fusion: “How can I say ‘I love you’ when…we are both caught up and transcended into a new oneness where…all is perfect and at one” (D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love [New York: Barnes & Noble, 1916], p. 354). To Shelley, love is romantic and sexual:

“Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound
And our veins beat together…

The fountains of our deepest life, shall be
Confused in Passion’s golden purity

We shall become the same”

(Shelley, Epipsychidion [Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger, 1821], lines 565-573).

Others see heartache and conflict as unavoidable, such as Ovid: “Love offers less pleasure than pain; Lovers…suffer again and again….their pains are innumerable” (The Art of Love [New York: The Modern Library, 2002], p. 93). He also feels that, “Love is a kind of war. Faint hearts, you’re debarred….You’re in for suffering” (Ovid, Love, pp. 71-73). Paul Simon sings:

“Love’s no romance

Love will do you in

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And love will wash you out.”

Rodgers and Hart have a skeptical view:

“When love congeals – it soon reveals

The faint aroma – of performing seals

The double-crossing – of a pair of heals

I wish I were in love again.”

These divergent visions of romance show the extremes of love’s joys and despairs. Given this broad spectrum on what romance is and how long it lasts, it is unclear to what extent love is enduring devotion, the double-crossing of a pair of heels or an opening door. Literature exemplifies but does not answer the question about what it is in love that brings on these ecstasies and disorders.

If literature and song provide an inconsistent vision on the meaning of love, can philosophy with its goal of conceptual clarity illuminate love’s various natures?

Pre-Freudian Western philosophy focused on three overlapping and diverging ideas about love: eros, philia, and agape. Plato gives his conception of eros, which is that love heals the wound of being human by uniting the halves that have been divided. Lovers cling together and do not ever want to be separated. Platonic love completes individuals; harmony reigns over conflict. Mortality threatens this perpetual union. By having children, Plato believes the individual insures immortality. Valuing one’s offspring “is for the sake of immortality” and “this zeal…is Love” (Plato, Complete Works: Symposium [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company 1997], pp. 474-475, 488-489, 491). Plato shows both romantic and parental love.

The meaning of philia is explicated by Aristotle; this Greek word is usually translated as friendship. According to philosopher Richard White, philia “literally refers to one’s ‘nearest and dearest’” (Richard White, Love’s Philosophy, [New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001], p.24). Philia, Aristotle declares, is concerned more with giving than receiving affection (Aristotle, Nicomachean

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Ethics [Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 962], p. 229). To him, those who care wish to do good for one another and such relationships are free from complaints, quarrels, and conflicting loyalties (Aristotle, Ethics, p. 240).

Agape, another Greek word for love, calls on the deepest part of the self to be dedicated to God. Deuteronomy directs that “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might” (The Holy Scriptures: Deuteronomy [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1917], 6:5, p, 221). This devotion has a human component. “The heart shall not have hate, and neighbors are to be loved as thyself” (Holy Scriptures: Leviticus, 19:17-18. p. 143). The first epistle of John says: “Let us love one another: for love is of God….God is love” (The Holy Bible: King James: John [Nashville: Gideons International, 1961], 4:7-8, p. 1088).

Each of these variations on the meaning of love is illuminating in its own way, yet they are one-sided, and stress harmony and benevolence. There is no tension or conflict between different kinds of love. The side of love that is destructive or self-seeking is absent from all three versions, and what enhances and what diminishes love is not a topic of interest. Only Plato gives any hint of the passions of sexual union.

Philosophy after Freud includes a broader spectrum of love’s emotions, a fuller picture of love’s entanglements and complexities. As Freud is a major turning point in how love is perceived, rather than examine philosophers influenced by his ideas, it is best to turn to the primary source and see what Freud and his descendants have to say about love, its dynamics, motivations, and various manifestations; what strengthens and weakens it; and the relationship of parental love to marital attachment. Can the psychoanalytic emphasis on the unconscious, sexuality, and the family romance fully confront the wild paradoxes of fulfillment and destruction in our love relationships?

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Do not expect just one answer from psychoanalysis. It, like most disciplines, has conceptual, methodological, and ideological divisions. There is a dialogue among those influenced by Freud as to the nature and extent of passionate and parental attachments. A review of what psychoanalysts and related psychologists have said about love can bring understanding but will also need comparison, integration, and recognition of plural viewpoints. This inquiry cannot only help us understand dilemmas within the definition of love, but also the fragmentation and interconnections within the history of psychoanalysis.

This issue of Clio’s Psyche will have critical reviews of psychoanalytic books on love, attachment, intimacy, and hate, as well as other articles on these complex subjects. They will range from Freud’s original ideas to more recent examinations of the nature of love.

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