The Great Game of Love

I’VE NEVER FORGOTTEN that Polaroid image. A boy and a girl.

He’s wearing a short-sleeved checkered shirt over flannel shorts. Stiff knees tensely bent backward, scowling at the cam­era. It looks like he’s getting choked by a spongy bathrobe belt knotted into a makeshift tie around his neck.

To his left, a girl, taller than him, is wearing a woollen blanket as if it were a dress roped around her chest. Her hair is covered by a kerchief secured snugly under her chin. On her lips there’s a hint of a smile. The eyes are stern, determined. The title of this photograph is penned behind the Polaroid: ‘The bride and the groom’.

The date is 1971. I was barely 5, my sister 7. We were standing on the small balcony of our family house, my facial expres­sion revealing I was forced into playing this matrimonial charade, bullied as I was by two older, stronger sisters until I turned 10 and punched my fist into emancipation from sibling tyranny.

The episode documented in this picture is the main reason why I decided to delay my real marriage until I turned 48. In other words, it took me 43 years to get over being forced by my own sister into playacting a child marriage.

The truth is I grew up in a household that allowed its children to develop an anti-systemic mentality. For years I fended off the idea of marriage by preaching that if the feelings between two people are genuine, forcing them to sign their commitment on a piece of paper is equivalent to undermining the veracity of those sentiments. Saying “I love you” should be binding enough. Having to seal it on paper proves that the verbal vow is not binding, and the two lovers are untrustworthy. What need is there, anyway, for society to recognise what is an intimate sentiment between partners? Isn’t marriage the primary cause for divorce?

Then my Indian girlfriend proposed. Again, a woman forcing me into marriage. I had resisted for so many decades, why capitu­late? I asked for an Indian wedding in exchange. And got it. This has led me to investigate the Arya Samaj ritual we adopted, since during the ceremony I was asked to show my bride the double stars in the handle of the Big Dipper, Vasishtha and Arundhati, symbolic of the ideal couple, marital fulfilment, conjugal love, loyalty and affection. The idea, which so far seems to be working out for my wife and me, is that the spouses support each other in reaching common goals. Together.

This also brought me to ask myself more questions about the ideas of marriage, about love and about being in love as they are perceived in India, the country where I live, with one of the lowest divorce rates in the world and where surveys say most people support some form of arranged marriage, in juxtaposition with the romantic view of love marriages in Europe and America, the two continents where I grew up.

I still believe it’s not mandatory for two people who love each other to get married. But I’ve grown to understand the concept that love can build a family, and families are also the foundation on which most contemporary nations are based. It’s a useful way to structure societies and to build a reciprocal support nucleus. It’s the first stage of mutual support. But it is often a messy, conflicted system, proven by the fact that, in many societies, families are also where most homicides are committed.

PLATO, THE FLAVOUR OF GOD, AND KAMADEVA’S ARROWS

There are differing interpretations across geographies and generations around the idea of love and of being in love, two emotions that for many religions and philosophies seem to be the engine of humanity, the glue saving us from extinction.

According to the Symposium, Plato’s philosophical rumina­tion on love banned in some countries because it clearly encour­ages same-sex relations between older and younger men, it is through eros, or passion, that we learn how to achieve excellence, arête, the root word of aristocracy, or “the power of the best”.

The Symposium seems preoccupied with the concept of being in love rather than of love. Here, eros is not just passion for the flesh, but the craving for beauty itself, which, accord­ing to the Greek philosopher, is equivalent to truth, or true knowledge. The theory postulates that in the enamorment for an individual, we are seeking a higher mystical truth.

How does this help us in understanding love and marriage today? I reached into my shelf to read what the Florentine Renaissance’s priest-philosopher Marsilio Ficino said in his Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love.

The premise is that we understand very little, of course. And yet we keep doing it: “We all constantly love, one way or another. Almost all of us love the wrong way: and the more we love, the worse we love,” wrote the inventor of the term “Platonic love”.

Love is a force craving the brightness of a supreme majesty which shines through the bodies of the lovers. In each other, lov­ers unknowingly are seeking God. “Lovers don’t know what they desire or what they are looking for, because they don’t know God.”

Here’s where philosophy melts into poetry, because, accord­ing to Ficino, God hides his “occult flavour” in us humans, which is revealed through “the sweet smell of himself, so that everyone is excited by that scent. We can smell the divine essence but can’t feel the taste. That’s why we are aroused by the manifested scent, craving the hidden flavour, but we do not grasp what it is that we desire. And this is also why Lovers have always fear and reverence for the appearance of the loved one.”

Love transforms people because the lover wants to become like the loved one, who is a channel of divinity for the lover “because in so doing he craves and tries to become a god. For who wouldn’t want to become one?” In the process, lovers often let out sighs: “because they are destroying their own selves”, and they laugh “because they are transforming themselves into something better”.

This cathartic aspect is also why love is bitter, according to Plato. Or as Orpheus calls it, love is “a bitter-sweet apple”. “Be­cause love is a voluntary death, and death is bitter, but since it is voluntary it is sweet. He who loves, dies loving because his thoughts, turning to the loved one, make him forget himself.”

In so doing, lovers go outside of their own souls in a mysti­cal alchemy, becoming transformed: “When two people love each other, one lives in the other.” For Ficino, that “greediness of restoring the oneness is called love”. And this is why the entire process reaches the heights of mysticism. The erotic craving is seen as a pursuit of truth and of oneness with the universe.

This highly Vedic interpretation of Platonism is filled with parallelisms in Indian philosophy. God hiding the scent of his un­attainable flavour in the lovers evokes Lord Kama’s five passion-igniting scented arrows, a technique later stolen by Cupid, the Greek god of passion.

Kamadeva’s sugarcane bow strikes the five flowers of Aravinda (white lotus); Ashoka; Choota (mango); Navamallika (jasmine); and Neelotpala (blue lotus). It is the fragrance that awakes the passion. Love is in the air, as the song goes.

Kama is accompanied by Vasanta, the god of spring, blos­soming and flowers, however he’s also escorted by the chaotic Maras, violent disruptors shouting, “cut and kill,” distracting from inner peace.

And herein lies the founding philosophical difference. Be­cause while romantic love is sung and hailed across the world, its disruptive nature is also unmasked. And this has been true for centuries in the entire world, in Europe as much as in Asia.

Destructive and passionate love has not necessarily been associated with marriage. Love marriage is an idea started in some circles in medieval times, later developed by cunning French courtesans who, on the eve of the Revolution, con­vinced the nobles to marry them and that love marriage was a good thing for future societies.

In the same historical period, the guarantee of “the pursuit of happiness” in the American constitution led some to believe that this right included being able to marry whom you love, not who’s best suited for you according to your family. Before that, star-crossed lovers ended almost always badly. Passionate love was adulterous, banned, secretive. Not necessarily marriage material.

THE SCIENCE OF LOVE

Science explains how romantic love works. And science can be extremely unromantic. It breaks things down, it’s cold. But it is useful in understanding the entrapments of our mechanisms.

Falling in love is a matter of the brain not the heart, science ex­plains. It is a series of genetic cues, hormonal responses and mostly neurochemicals that hit us just like the five arrows of Kamadeva.

Harvard researcher Katherine Wu has divided the three phases of infatuation, or romantic love, according to the sequence of chemicals released in our bodies.

The first phase is lust, when testosterone and estrogen dominate our behaviour.

The second phase is attraction, when dopamine, norepineph­rine and serotonin take over our actions. These five chemicals perfectly match the number of arrows Kamadeva strikes in the phase of enamorment. This can then blossom into a third and fi­nal phase, attachment—when oxytocin and vasopressin kick in.

Times may vary widely, depending on the couple, but it seems there’s a median of six months for the first phase of be­ing in love, when romantic passion and intimacy are accom­panied by jealousy and erratic actions (the Maras).

For another six months to two years, passionate love domi­nates: desire is still there, while commitment and intimacy increase. In the final phase of “companionate love”, there’s less craving, and commitment and intimacy reach their peak.

If, after a maximum of approximately three years, the part­ners haven’t solidly welded their bond, the attraction is over. Those who fail to understand this process are condemned to continually chase the chemicals that inject euphoria in the first phase of high love, as they keep seeking temporary partners to enjoy eros. Until they burn out.

This misconception could explain the high rates of divorce in Europe, North America and Australia, a phenomenon which has promoted the growth of remarriage societies built on the complexity of reconstructed families. Couples break up, new combinations are attempted, always on a hunt for someone in whom to lose oneself.

Which, according to the theory of projective identification developed by psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, may just be the problem. According to the Austrian author, we are equipped with a defence mechanism in which we project onto another person our own qualities that are unacceptable to our self. She believed, in other words, that individuals in a couple often proj­ect the part of themselves they dislike into their partner, where they can safely hate those aspects.

The problem is that, then, they can’t leave the partner because it would be like losing parts of themselves. This explains why so many couples go on fighting furiously but stay together for too long, until it’s truly unbearable and they divorce. And I suppose that’s why they say that you need to learn to love yourself before you can love someone else the right way. If you don’t, you might end up hating your partner for what you are.

Plato would still be right about the fact that “one lives in the other”, but not necessarily in loving harmony. Lovers often en­joy losing themselves in each other, only to later regret having lost their individuality and longing to find themselves again.

The increasingly transactional and consumeristic nature of life is morphing romantic love into a commodity to be used and discarded. The incapacity to sustain the testosterone/estrogen-drenched passionate phase leads to the contemporary unhap­piness of many people who keep seeking a second, third, fourth chance, now facilitated by the pre-packaged nature of apps.

THAT NEBULA CALLED ROMANTIC ENAMORMENT

Last night on the Tamil Nadu beach where I live, I observed a rite of passage of our latest adopted young pye-dog called Frankie because he howls like Frank Sinatra.

A female dog waited for him, crouching in the sand, far away. He hunkered. She moved towards him. He stood up, ears turned forward, then sat back down. She approached, then sat wagging her tail. He charged, she ran away, then stopped, he reached her, they smelled each other, he tried to mount her. She escaped in a more remote area of the casuarina woods, where he again jumped on top of her.

We are all animals guided by our chemicals. For three years, humans can stay in love—long enough for babies to learn to walk. Then we run out of hormones. Yet the way societies have developed has formed an everlasting concept of family. Our natural neurochemical love cocktail and our family-based socio-political construct often clash. How can we sew these op­posing forces? Not by being guided by blind enamorment.

I eventually outgrew that poorly dressed five-year-old unwilling groom immortalised in that traumatic Polaroid. As I developed into a young man, I discovered what falling in love does to your capacity to discern right from wrong. It utterly confuses it, like a dog chasing a scent and getting lost in the woods. Perhaps with good reason. Nature is pushing the animal towards reproduction, a joyful and yet distressing life-changing affair. And it distracts the capacity to discern and to choose by launching that hormonal disco-party described previously.

Just like any other romantic adolescent, I would write poems, hold sweaty hands in long cold walks, dream of run­ning away to start a new life, be passionate, be jealous, sigh and laugh, etcetera, etcetera. I was lied to, I was dumped, I was disap­pointed and ghosted, and I lied, I dumped, I disappointed, and I ghosted. I suffered. I was in a few “it’s complicated” messes. Kamadeva’s Maras. It was all part of that shambolic nebula that sprouts in any newly formed universe.

I realise now just how much my partners and I were as enamored of the idea of being in love as we were of the object of our starry-eyed fascinations. We were all in love with cheesy romanticism, addicted to the few drops of inebriating sweet poison it would ooze.

The idea of desire was the idea of the joy of life itself. Which is really at the heart of a lot of trouble. We rejected the con­struct that life is suffering, caused by craving, and that ending the latter would stop the former.

Romantic love is nearsighted; it worships the thrill of temporary joy, averting the gaze from the obvious consequence of the suffering it will bring. Which is what might explain how all those marriages based on craving end up in shambles (half of them, in the Western world). And yet in Europe, North America and Australia few can break out of this cycle.

Marriage, it is fiercely believed, has to be the result of being head over heels, losing your sense of reason, falling blindly in love with someone you are not truly seeing for who they are because you are too close to them, and your neurochemicals are impairing your judgement.

As I contemplate my own marriage, between someone who’s grown up in Europe and America and someone who was born and raised in India, I ask myself if the two of us have somehow managed, so far, to work out a combination of the two systems. And I wonder if this could be a healthy synthesis of the two approaches to love, of being in love and of marriage: letting the spark of enamorment work its magic but also using that fire to weld the basis for a longer-lasting pact. Self-arrange your mar­riage. Take the best of what comes spontaneously but allow the brain to evaluate the process rationally. Let others into the pro­cess. Listen to trusted friends and loving relatives. Voluntarily al­low the widening of the people involved in the decision process.

In other words, take the good of arranged marriage—the pondering, the accounting of complementary qualities, the good sense, the collective effort—but integrate it into the madness of romantic love. Could this be the way in which how love is experi­enced in the East can enrich how love is playing out in the West?

Plato may have been right all along. Through eros or passion we learn to achieve excellence if we can grasp the fact that beauty brings us true knowledge, and that true knowledge is also the capacity to look at ourselves, introspectively, and exercise some good sense while making the choices that could turn around our lives or, otherwise, become a long-lasting problem.

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