LOVING/BEING IN LOVE
Being in love with you, you become merely an appendage to my affection for a condition… the state of being in love.
Which is why those who are frequently „in love“ seem to be able to enter that condition so easily… and so briefly. Enchanted by a feeling rather than a person, I seek the other merely as the vehicle towards my feeling state, the carrier of my projections. The state („being in love“) refers back, not to the other, but to the verb („being“), which refers to me– he who is in love.
It is exactly for this reason that those who speak of themselves as „being in love“ rarely, if ever, mention the object of their professed affections… for the object is largely irrelevant. We ask: „Are you in love these days?“ And they reply: „Yes, I’m in love.“ But, like a bellhop at an expensive hotel– usually nameless and identity-less to those whose baggage he carries– the carrier of my romantic „baggage“ also remains nameless… and is easily replaced.
Loving you, however, is another matter entirely: the verb becomes dependent on its object for its completion. Where „I am in love“ can (and usually does) easily stand alone, „I love _______ requires an identity– a particularity— to complete it. Being „in love“ with you, I do you no particular honor–the pain I suffer in losing you is merely the pain I suffer in losing the image of myself as one enlivened by a particular condition. But, loving you, you become immediately particular, unique, irreplaceable… dangerous, in many ways, to my sense of security, which will not readily, if ever, be able to find anyone like you to take your place.
Which is why people seem so much more eager, so much more likely, to be „in love.“ For– in a culture where we are always told to prefer the disposable, the replaceable (from razors to pens to cigarette lighters to people)– is it any wonder that the objects of love itself should, sooner or later, become disposable as well– nameless, faceless, soulless, easily replaced?