The Eyes of Eros

Love is such a strange, complicated thing. What is it? Is it a connection between two people? Two or more people? Is it a willingness to sacrifice or an unwillingness to let go? Is it something deep and spiritual? Or is it just the result of chemicals in the brain encouraging creatures to breed?

Technically speaking, it’s me. There’s a concept in physics in which every fundamental force is represented by a particle - a blip in some cosmic field. Electricity and magnetism are photons.  Mass is the Higgs Boson. I’m a little bit like that - an entity borne from something deeply fundamental to your existence. Something you can feel the effects of, but not truly see. I’ve been personified in many different ways - a little cherub with wings and a bow, a strapping young man with the same, a many armed god with a chariot pulled by parrots or his partner on a golden throne. Just as you made death Thanatos or a skeleton with a scythe, you’ve always given me identities too. Because I am something intrinsic to you. I’m a part of you.

But that does not mean I understand you. I might be love, but love is a mystery to me. I feel all that you all feel, all of the time. It is an endless, chaotic noise in the background of my existence that I cannot ignore because it is inherent to my very being. If a human being sat in a room with hundreds of different songs playing at full volume at once, could they learn the lyrics to a single one?

My existence allows you to feel those things. My existence allows you to love and be loved. Anywhere there is love, I can be in an instant. But I can never ask you about it. I can only feel what you feel and observe. This frustrates me. How can I understand myself if I’m eternally separated from the people who can give me the answers? 

I can look to a schoolyard and see two children sitting on a bench outside of a classroom. I can feel the way the boy’s heart pounds in his chest. I can feel his nervousness - how he worries she might notice his blushing, or the way his eyes linger on her just a little too long. I can feel him agonising over what to say. I can feel how much he wants to make the girl laugh just so he can see her smile. I can sense that he will never tell her how he feels because, if he does, she might reject him and never talk to him again. He doesn’t want that. So he lies to himself and tells himself that he is content so long as they can keep sitting on that bench in each other’s company.

Is that what love is? That desperate desire just to keep someone’s smile in your life? The fear that if that person knew how you feel, they might leave you? Is it that faint, fleeting hope that they will figure it out anyway and be overjoyed? Those seem so complicated, but really they are so simple. Those emotions are simultaneously so powerful and pure. But they are also underdeveloped and fleeting. Certainly, that boy would call those feelings love - at least in the privacy of his own thoughts.

Perhaps though, that boy’s feelings are still too immature to really count. Maybe I should look to people who still have some of that youthful intensity, but tempered with more mature fears. Not far from those children on the bench, I can see two young men. They also sit together, but they have made their feelings known to each other - and only to each other. They understand that their feelings are not complicated, the world around them is. One of them is desperate to let everything he has to keep buried and hidden from all but his beloved escape out into the world. He longs for the freedom and relief that would bring. He knows that the world is changing and growing to understand him better. But he also understands that parts of the world haven’t finished growing up yet, and that those parts scare his partner. Just as he so desperately wants to shout from the rooftops how he feels, he understands his partner just as fiercely wants to remain hidden and safe. His partner understands that their love is theirs alone and they do not have an obligation to share it with their surroundings. I can see how the first young man agonises over his continued silence, but refuses to speak because doing so would be risking what they have together. So he doesn’t shout from the rooftops, he just lets his feelings quietly simmer inside him instead.

So is that love? Is it a willingness to put the needs of someone else first? To choose to suffer in silence so that your world doesn’t fall apart? I have seen this same story play out many times in my existence. Sometimes they stay silent forever. Sometimes they cannot, and then the other must choose if they value their relationship or their security more. I have seen all three choices made, all with varying degrees of struggle. I cannot help but feel that all of those options are love, and that means I will find no answers with those young men.

If I look at those four young people, it is easy to surmise that their youth contributes greatly to my confusion. I should not use them as a baseline to define myself when they are still discovering who they are.

Turning my attention elsewhere, half a world away, I can look at a middle-aged couple. They have been married for twenty years. They have three children whom they adore and have utmost pride in. But the years are starting to weigh on them. They care about each other, but they no longer desire each other the same way. That burning passion they had in their uncertain youth has now fizzled to embers, consistently burning but offering little warmth. Each of them secretly wonders if it would be okay to turn to someone else for gratification, to add an element of flux and change to lives that feel so stale. But each is terrified to voice this question. Just like the younger pairs, they don’t know what will happen if they open their mouths and speak the truth. They would rather not risk dousing the fire altogether. They value each other and their family too much to take the gamble, even though they both secretly feel the same. 

The couple next door to them are close in age, but they don’t seem to have this problem. They also have children. They also have jobs. But they still seem so full of life. The biggest difference is that they seem to have more in common. They share the same hobbies and they undertake them together. The first couple have tried, but as much as they care for each other, they do not care for the same pastimes. 

Is love about stability then? Is it about what is shared between two people and what isn’t? Is that first couple’s love lesser because they do not physically desire each other? Would that passionate spark return if they could find more common ground? Neither of them wishes to leave the other. They just grieve for the intensity that they once had. They feel jealous of their neighbours who never seem to have lost it. I don’t think I can find my answers here either. For all the things these two couples have in common, they are so different. I’m not sure I can define myself as two opposite sides of a spectrum.

In yet another part of the world, there is an elderly pair. They are similar to the couple with the waning passion for each other. They have been together for fifty years. They went through a similar experience once. They even tried seeing other people. But they ended up staying with each other and only each other. Now one of them is laying in a hospital bed, his hand held by his doting wife. His time on the Earth is coming to a close. He feels no regret, bar that his wife must suffer the pain of his loss. She smiles at him. She tells jokes. She does everything she can to make sure he knows she will be okay even though she doubts that to be the case. She is terrified of living her remaining years without him. There is so much consideration shared between them, even if they are basking only in the light of coals. Even if a terrible, painful grief will soon befall one of them. Even though the other feels guilty that she will feel it.

Is that what a true, matured love is then? Is it the willingness to smile at your partner and tell them everything will be okay, even when inside you feel yourself breaking apart? Is it being willing to shoulder the burden of an inevitable parting, because the decades before make that incredible pain worth it? Is that love more real than the all encompassing infatuation of the boy on the bench? The young men who struggle to exist together, wanting different things in a world that is still catching up to them? Or the couple who care for each other but fantasise about sleeping with someone else?

What of all the other, vastly different snapshots I can see? The two girls who have been friends since they were little more than toddlers, now realising they want to be something more but don’t know how? The two men who love the same woman, who in turn loves both of them equally? The bitter old couple who stay together because they don’t know how to be apart? But who still buys each other their favourite treats every Valentines day and remembers every happy anniversary? The old man who deeply loves his younger wife, who stays with him despite the constant barrage of insults from people who wrongly assume she only wants to inherit his wealth?

The truth of the matter is, all of these things must be love. Because I can sense it all. I can share in all those feelings and watch those stories play out. I have been doing so ever since such emotions were first felt. Since long before anyone tried to give me a face or a name. Yet I still struggle to understand it, because it is all so different. 

Perhaps I simply must accept that I am confused because I am many-faceted. Perhaps I struggle to understand who and what I am because I am so many different things. 

I think that I can learn to be okay with that, even as I am compelled to continue to explore myself.