By: Aditi Debnath
A: How do you personally know when you’re in love?
N: Oh, that’s a...
A: You can take a minute, no worries.
N: Um… I find it really hard to trust people, and sometimes when I click with someone there’s just this level of trust that I feel. I just know that this is a strong relationship whether it be friendship or a love relationship.
Love is a constantly evolving concept. Turning to the dictionary for answers, love is first defined as “a feeling of warm, personal attachment or deep affection.” However, this seems too simple a definition. I could argue that I feel a warm, personal attachment towards my ovarian cyst that got me out of two months-worth of classes, but I would not say that I loved it. To further explore the cultural definition of love, I consulted a much more reliable source: The Urban Dictionary.
There, the first definition states plainly, “Love is something you give to someone.” Unfortunately, most of the definitions were about as vague as this one, but they all contained similar themes. Along with countless references to “passion” and “selflessness” and “butterflies,” each definition agreed that love is something one can’t help but feel; it is involuntary, powerful, and—at risk of sounding cliché—blind.
A: How long had you been with your partner before quarantine?
N: We had been dating since November - about six months.
This is Natasha. As reputable a source as the Urban Dictionary is, I sought out someone with first-hand experience with love to help me define it. Love manifests itself in relationships in countless ways; how it does so in a controlled environment such as quarantine, however, is what I wanted to know in particular.
A: How often did you see your partner during quarantine?
N: We were already long distance, but with quarantine... you couldn’t visit them anymore which definitely made it hard. We used to see each other, like, at least once a month, and then with quarantine it became two months, three months, because, you know, everything was shut down, and we were all inside trying not to get sick.
No stranger to single-life, I—like many others during quarantine—isolated myself at home, envious of those who had a partner to share lockdown with. I hadn’t considered that, for a long-distance relationship like Natasha’s, quarantine actually puts even more distance between a couple.
A: In what ways did you see the relationship change after the stay-at-home order hit?
N: I think the biggest thing is it really just became less intimate. We definitely got farther apart because… Well I feel like we ran out of things to talk about. It was hard, and I think it’s a large part of why the relationship fell apart because we just couldn’t see each other. I don’t hold it against him or me; I think there’s just a loss of intimacy when you can only see each other through a screen.
Natasha’s relationship ended shortly after quarantine, but there seems to be a more significant reason behind why isolation is so strenuous on relationships. Certainly there had to be a force stronger than the love between Natasha and her partner to cause them to break up.
This drove me to C.S. Lewis’s 1960 book The Four Loves. It’s Lewis’s exploration of the nature of love, specifically using the four terms Greek philosophers use to differentiate between types of love: Storge, Philia, Eros, and Agape. After warning against the modern tendency for people to submit completely to Eros, the term for romantic or intimate love, Lewis states that "Eros in all his splendour ... may urge to evil as well as good" (Lewis 124). He then claims that Eros is a neutral force and explains how this indifferent nature qualifies it as a “natural love.” The natural loves include Eros, Storge, and Philia, and must be subordinate to the fourth and greatest of all the loves: Agape.
Though Lewis specifically defines Agape in terms of Christianity and the love of God, it really just refers to the love that exists regardless of changing circumstances. It is the unconditional or fundamental love that one might feel towards a religion or even to themself. This force is said to be stronger than the force of Eros, which made me more curious about Natasha’s experience in isolation. This time, I wanted to ask her about a different type of love.
A: Quarantine affected a lot of people mentally what with being so isolated and having so much ample time. Did you experience this or how did that affect your relationship?
N: I definitely had a lot of time to self-reflect, and I’m a big person in believing that we can always improve ourselves, so I’m always trying to work on personal growth. I’ve always been a very passive person; I’ve struggled a lot with that. Especially with spending so much time reflecting on myself it kind of made me think about how I need to take control of my life, and not let people walk all over me.
Natasha nurtured herself, just as Lewis described, until her Eros was forced to submit to her Agape. She used isolation to foster the love she felt for herself, and in doing so, realized that her relationship was not doing the same. Practicing self-love is especially difficult, but especially important, when in a global pandemic. Limited access to hobbies or friends or role-models implies a direct effect on one’s self image.
So maybe my quest to define love was a little bit in vain. There are already six different definitions of love in this blog post alone, and each one is entirely accurate as love is inherently boundless. While the love one feels for their partner is strong and compelling, it occurs passively. The love one feels for themself requires practice and intent.
N: [cont.] I think that it was something that was very new to me and is still really hard for me to do, but you spend all that time alone you start to realize, you know, how much time do we really have until the next pandemic?
References
Lewis, C. S. (2017). The Four Loves. San Francisco: HarperOne.