The meaning of love is not universally defined. Yet love is universal: it encompasses us with universal qualities that we understand and, more importantly, embrace. Love encompasses all like the blanket of snow covers the outside during winter’s time. In this sense, with the ways in which we come to personally interpret love we merely add to it as we add another layer of snow to a snowball in our hands.
The image of love is always a metaphorical one: like a waterfall of energy pouring into a pool we care about. But this metaphor is not enough, still blurry, for this vibrant cascade can only be as clear and meaningful as what birthed it. The painting of true love can never be complete without intention and choice.
Indeed, we can never truly know another person’s intention; we are only ever certain of our own. Choice thus becomes the most indicative of a person’s intention, because we know the choices we make are the most expressive means of materializing what we want, even if we don’t always intend on the outcome. However, our intention can be engendered by reasoning and wisdom just as it can be engendered by the seeking of variation and the pursuit of desires irreconcilable with logic. Love is that extraordinary thing because the strings from which it is always supported and dependent are made of choices with rational bases.
If a loving relationship is a painting, then love for a stranger, for instance — that person whom we would otherwise never meet had the winds of life blown us in any other direction — is extraordinary not only because we choose to care for them and give them ourselves on the canvas, but also because we choose what that waterfall of love looks like. We set the boundaries within which our love manifests.
Love between two people can only be as true as the mutual enframement within which they love each other; for without these choices and boundaries, love is otherwise indistinguishable from other passions as that extraordinary and exclusive thing. Without borders the waterfall simply drains off the canvas.
In Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tomas, a successful surgeon and incorrigible womanizer, fortuitously meets and falls in love with Tereza, a young waitress and photographer. For the previously married Tomas, Tereza is unlike any woman in his life: she is neither wife, nor mistress with whom he could rendezvous occasionally without romantic expectation. He realizes she is that someone who would “offer him up her life.”
Kundera writes:
“He had come to feel an inexplicable love for this all but complete stranger; she seemed a child to him, a child someone had put in a bulrush basket daubed with pitch and sent downstream for Tomas to fetch at the riverbank of his bed.”
From the outset of their story, Kundera brings a question mark to the sincerity of their relationship, and for the remainder of the book a doubtfulness lingers on the supposed love these two have for each other given the choices they make.
For Tomas, Kundera writes:
“Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite.”
Tomas loves in his desire to share a night’s sleep with one woman, Tereza, a desire which does not extend to other women, as sexual intercourse does. Nevertheless, as Tomas and Tereza spend time together, Tomas feels no need to change his way of life, and Tereza quickly learns of Tomas’s affairs, leaving her devastated.
First, Tomas denies his promiscuity, and then argues it does not oppose his love for her. Eventually, in hopes of relieving Tereza’s pain, they get married. Even after having become jealous from a hypothetical coupling of Tereza with another man, and furthermore placing himself more compassionately in her position to understand her suffering, Tomas still maintains his promiscuous lifestyle.
All the while, Tereza loves from a place of weakness. Feeling constrained by her living conditions in a small town, and burdened by insecurities brought on by her mother most of her life, she finds an escape with Tomas. Nevertheless she feels weaker than Tomas, and when she’s left jealous and hurt by his infidelity, she doesn’t condemn him; instead, she wants him to be as weak as she is. She eventually leaves him thinking that, Kundera writes:
“In spite of their love, they had made each other’s life a hell. The fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their behaviour or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their incompatibility: he was strong and she was weak…
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”
Ultimately, Tomas follows after Tereza and they find their way back in each other’s lives, but just as a doctor aware of the damage he self-imposes when he smokes deceives himself with the chapeau of unreasonable desire (“I want to smoke”) do Tomas and Tereza, too, fool themselves into smoking the wounding cigarette of a false love?
The complex intertwinings of people can’t easily be unraveled and simplified, but the dynamics of such a relationship bring us to consider the reality in the background of the many extraordinary things in life like love, asking: aren’t we just fooling ourselves — and thus denying ourselves of good — by pursuing intentions that don’t make sense?
Tomas is unhappy because he can only think about Tereza when he’s with someone else, and Tereza is unhappy because she can only think about Tomas being with someone else.
How, then, especially after having accepted Tereza and her fidelity, can Tomas truly love Tereza if he circumnavigates giving up what he himself considers a less meaningful passion to make her happy? How can Tereza truly love a man who can’t be faithful to her?
Tomas and Tereza’s incompatibility ultimately lies in the absence of agreement — which is to say while they share an intimacy that goes beyond sex to enable a comforting sleep, it is not otherwise harmonious nor made special through established, reasonable boundaries within which they are intimate.
So if we’re going to be illogical, we have to make sure we’re comfortable with the consequences.
Love is universal because in that bulrush basket sent downstream exists a purity that embraces all as the pure snow embraces the outside during winter’s time: at the heart of love we find an image of ourselves, seated, and without the person aware, we’re thinking about them; most unconditionally we want the best for them; most genuinely and without any expectation of reciprocation we want them to be happy; and maybe by the end of this train of thought, we want to be with them too; and grow old with them; and deepen our understanding of ourselves with them; and pour ourselves into their pool from which happiness evaporates.
By the end, Tomas and Tereza give up their lives in the city and move to the country for a while. Growing older, and with Tomas no longer unfaithful, they believe they’re happy together. Certainly they deny each other a relationship that is comfortable and content for a while. Nevertheless they’re bound as two liquid pearls rolling down the window on a rainy evening are eventually bound. From the moment they meet, they provide a metaphor for the other that, like the question mark on their relationship, persists as well. They get something from each other — whatever they believe it to be — that is good enough for them. Still, is it true love? Maybe not. But it could be.
What’s important is their complexities, even if not necessarily relatable, bring us to carefully consider our own complexities as we move through the world looking for a genuine connection. True intimacy entails the kind of relationship that doesn’t compromise an individual’s identity, and instead brings them to think about the things that actually matter.
We need to reasonably consider what we want and why we want the things we want. We can love when we can honestly reflect on our faults, and honestly establish lines we are willing to stay behind, because when that bulrush basket is sent downstream some day, we’ll start painting on the canvas.
As long as we can be honest with ourselves, we can be honest with our love.
