Eros.
"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death."
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning - 1806-1861
Eros, known as the love between the sexes, more specifically in this post, known as the state of being in love. In all honesty, I do not even know where to start, it almost feels like writer's block, but that's only because love has a lot to it.
True love! Love at first sight! Love isn't real! Love is a risk! Love is blind! Love is worth everything!
I know many people have a negative view of love, many of them being victims of the infamous heartbreak. But I've had the chance of meeting others that had just never been in love or otherwise were in this, so rather deceptive, form of love – sexual desire, and in a more innocent manner, a strong and weird kind of fondness for another and the possibility to change social status, commonly from "single" to" in a relationship" or even to "married". The group of people having been first-hand recipients of disappointment and heartbreaks hate the idea of love entirely for the offense bestowed on them, they hate it because they can't seem to imagine how adoring one person over every other, could be paid with rejection or deception. The other group of people that merely find pleasure in the idea of being "cuffed" and taking part in the occasional "hook up" may tend to not be fond of or be particularly familiar with the truth that is Eros – preoccupation with the beloved in their totality, not only for what they might offer– a status, random and unpredictable moments of ecstasy, the thrill, the drama, or the fantasy.
This stands for reasons foreign to me unless I guessed it to be the memorable experience, the story to one day tell perhaps? As unfortunate as both scenarios are, they both just seem to explicitly prove the existence of Eros, one in its failure, and the other in its complete absence or misunderstood nature. Let me not forget to mention that, it would be better for both parties to think alike in those very circumstances, in order to avoid the emotional impairment most likely to land upon either one of them, but as imperfect as the world ought to be, there almost always is a party that holds true Eros for the other that bears the ignorance of it, it's all but unfortunate.
"But what sort of good fortune must fall upon a man that truly seeks to experience the splendor of the uncorrupted escapade, Perfect Eros?" What really?
We would have to change the world, is my answer. The common phrase "It starts with me" is to be taken for gospel truth in this sense. Eros encompasses the fair and the ugly, so to truly "start with you" one would have to acknowledge that the "man in the mirror" could more accurately be referred to as the "men in the mirror", the reflection of the one looking into it staring back, and the reflection of the two-faced one that governs his adoration for another. The revelation of this saves said one, from a lot of rather unnecessary heartache. Once Eros and both its beauty and danger are identified the latter is duly exposed and the former illuminated.
THE BEAUTY OF EROS.
Eros makes it easy to desire in the strictest sense not of course any person, but "that very one"( which is why I very strongly believe you can't cheat on the person you love). The lover in some mysterious fashion desires the beloved, rather than the pleasure they could give. Without Eros, every desire is primarily about ourselves, but within Eros, it's about the beloved.
Eros makes lust for the other altruistic, tosses personal happiness aside as a triviality, and plants the interests of another in the center of our own being. It overleaps the high wall of our self-hood. We find ourselves really fulfilling the law, really loving another as ourselves.
"Eros makes vows without being asked." With Eros, the words "I will ever be true, and will ever be here" aren't words to be birthed only before the marriage officiant, like a child's first utterance, this is Eros's own.
Eros embraces playfulness and the comic, C.S. Lewis says "Lovers, like everyone else, continue to feel an element not only of play or comedy, but even of buffoonery in the body’s expression of Eros, and the body in this relation as elsewhere would betray and frustrate us if this ceased to be so. "Eros, in most times long ago was treated with extreme seriousness, normally referred to by our ancestors as "Venus", the carnal ingredient within Eros. In turn making the matter of two people being attracted to each other a matter of business, business related to procreation,( Look up the concept of the "man and superman" and "The Life-force" a play by Shaw) which only demanded a serious approach. Eros allows the man and his beloved the chance to be playful and free-minded.
"Natural things are dangerous when they begin to seem too divine."
With Eros, there is the sacrifice for possible future pain and despair. "For it’s the very mark of Eros that when it is in us we would rather share unhappiness with our beloved than be happy on any other terms. Even when the impossibility of happiness in marriage with our beloved becomes inescapably clear, Eros never hesitates to say ‘better this than parting’, ‘better to be miserable with him/her than be happy without him/her, ‘better our two hearts should break together than mend and be whole apart’. If the passion within you doesn't say this, it's not Eros."
THE DANGER OF EROS.
The sinfulness or innocence of the act of love does not depend in the least on the presence or absence of Eros.
Thousands of generations of our ancestors were married off in early youth to partners chosen by their parents, partners they weren't in love with. Dozens of them were good people and kept their vows. The mutual duty of ‘paying their marriage debt’ [reciprocal conjugal rights] as it was called, was discharged with no other ammunition than plain animal appetite, for no other was to be had, and they did right. On the other hand, this act done under the influence of soaring Eros may yet lead to plain fornication, and adultery and may involve breaking a girlfriend/wife's heart, deceiving a boyfriend/husband, betraying a friend, and abandoning one's children.
Eros may urge people to do evil as well as good. It most often is neither wandering lust nor idle sentiment that draws miserable couples into cruel and treacherous unions and to suicide and murder, usually, such awful propulsions are a result of Eros.
Eros can harness in us a form of Idolatry, people captured by the voice of Eros will follow every call it makes, and the urge to follow "love's law" and not God's law gets stronger ‘It is for love of you that I've neglected my father, for love of you that I cheated my partner, for love of you that I denied my family,' and all the time we have a tormenting paradox with this quasi-god, this Eros, whose voice sounds like the eternal, and isn't eternal at all. It is notoriously, the most desperately mortal of our passions. With Eros, idolatry of one another or of itself may arise, and the ones under its grasp may get completely consumed by the pleasures of Eros when it becomes a means for total completion.
"Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god."- C.S. Lewis.
Even though Eros promises permanence, permanence is not kept by Eros, permanence is kept by the ones in which Eros resides. If the couple does not work to keep Eros, Eros will die.
C.S. Lewis says: "Not to say that these dangers can’t be averted – they are averted daily by thousands of couples. But they're not averted by Eros himself. The lovers who idolized him, who trusted all to the strength of their original emotion will fare the worst.
If love is to remain and to remain himself he must be supported by outside help and this
everyone knows, in clearer language, you need the firm will to justice. You need a
will already pretty well-trained and disciplined – in the long run, you need the grace of God –
and in this Eros is like all the natural loves. They have not within themselves resources to
secure their own permanence, or to keep themselves from internal corruptions, nor to be
innocent in dealing with those outside the circle of love. ‘They need the help of higher powers in order to become and remain themselves’. The more we trust them to be self-sufficing, self-corrective and self-perpetuating, the more deceived we shall be.
It's rather like a garden, a garden is a glorious thing – full of life and giving us life – but you
must not trust your garden to weed itself, or fence itself, or prune itself, or anything of that sort.
It hasn't got that kind of goodness. A garden left to nature will soon not be a garden. It's the
same with our passions. They also are life-giving, but when God planted that garden of our
passions, he set a man over it to dress it, and set the man under Himself."
Words from the Author.
Love has its beauty and its dangers, but that danger is capable of being only if we let it, and that would happen only if we disregarded the help that we need to even be able to love right, the help that comes from the author and origin of Love, who is yet Love himself, God.
For those that do not believe in love, personally, I think you most probably don't believe in it because what was shown to you in your past relationships should have been described as anything but love, but unless what you had at the time wasn't love either and you were well aware, there is no reason to keep the disbelief, because you are proof of its existence. Those that haven't truly loved before, hang in there, Eros is notorious for its surprises.
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