Introduction
Romantic love is both beautiful and exhilarating, as well as tragic and soul crushing. Why do we chose to submit ourselves to such mental torment? Is love a source of significance in our life, or an escape from loneliness and suffering? Is love a cover for sexual desire, or a biological trick to induce us to reproduce? Is it all we require? Is it really necessary?
If romantic love has a purpose, science and psychology have yet to uncover one. However, some of our most illustrious thinkers have proposed some fascinating views throughout history. Love receives the most votes us.
Plato’s philosophy
Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher, investigated the concept that humans must love in order to be full. He described a dinner gathering at which Artistopher, a comic dramatist, charmed the guests with the following story in his seminar:
Humans used to have four arms, four legs, and two faces. One day, the angry gods attacked Zeus, and he sliced them all in half. Since then, everyone has been missing half of themselves. Love is the desire to meet a partner who would make us feel complete again—or so Plato imagined a drunken comic would remark at a party. Love scams us into having children.
Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy
Much later, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that sexual desire-based love was a sensual illusion. He proposed that we love because our wants lead us to assume that another person would make us happy, but that we are completely wrong. Nature fakes us into reproducing, and the loving union we crave is realized in our children. When our physical or sexual demands are gratified, we are thrown back into tortured life, and our soul success is the survival of the species and the reproduction of the human slavery cycle. Someone is in need of a hug; love provides an escape from our loneliness.
Bertrand Russell’s philosophy
We love to satisfy our bodily and psychological urges, according to Nobel Prize-winning British philosopher Bertrand Russell. Humans are intended to breed, yet sex is unsatisfactory without the joy of passionate love. Fear of the cruel, cold environment tempts us to build hard shells to shield and separate ourselves.
Love’s thrill, connection, and warmth support us in conquering our anxiety of the world, escaping our lonely shells, and engaging in life more abundantly. Love empowers our entire existence, making it the finest thing in the world. “Love is a misleading sickness.”
Siddhartha Gautama’s philosophy
Siddhartha Gautama, often known as the Buddha or the Enlightened One, would have definitely had some interesting debates with Russell. Buddha advocated that we love in order to satisfy our basic cravings. However, our emotional desires are faults, and attachments, including romantic love, are a major source of pain. Fortunately, Buddha found the eight-fold path, a method for extinguishing the fires of wants in order to achieve paradise, an enlightened state of calm, clarity, knowledge, and compassion.
In one of China’s best classical novels, “The Dream of the Red Chamber,” author Cao Xequin conveyed this Buddhist view that passionate love is foolishness. Jia Rui falls in love with Xi-Feng, who scams and humiliates him in a subplot. Love and hatred tear him apart, but a Buddhist offers him a magical mirror that can cure him as long as he doesn’t look at the front of it.
He sees Xi-Feng. His spirit is drawn into the mirror and carried away in iron chains to death. Not all Buddhists believe this way about romantic and sensual love, but the conclusion of the narrative is that such attachments foreshadow disaster and should be avoided, much like magic mirrors. Love enables us to go beyond ourselves. Let us end on a more encouragement and inspiration.
Simone De Beauvoir
A French philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir, stated that love is the desire to integrate with another and that it infuses or lives with meaning. She was, however, less concerned with why we love and more concerned with how we may love better. She saw that the difficulty with traditional romantic love is that it may be so attractive that we are tempted to make it our only reason for being. However, relying on others to justify our existence can quickly lead to boredom and power struggles.
To avoid falling into this trap, Beauvoir suggested loving truly, which is more similar to a wonderful friendship. Lovers help each other find themselves, reach beyond themselves, and enhance their lives and the world. We may never understand why we fall in love, but we can be assured that it will be an emotional roller-coaster journey. It’s both terrifying and thrilling. It causes us to suffer as well as soar. Perhaps we are losing ourselves. It may be heartbreaking, or it could be the finest thing ever. Will you risk find out?
“Love is the force that motivates a man to continue the struggle of his journey toward his desired destination.”
Minahil Imdad
conclusion
We all search for that one thing that makes our lives worthwhile, whether it’s a wonderful pastime or a wonderful relationship, throughout our lives. This one thing helps us to develop in ways we could never have imagined, and our world would be empty without it. Some call it love, while others call it something else; I’ll let you determine where you think “love” lies.