in love

It was Oscar Wilde who once said that he had never fallen in love, but had slipped in it a few times.”

But there seems to be two kinds of love. There is the spiritual, heavenly love that is synonymous with a connection to god and the divine. And there is the more mundane love, which we experience in relationship to one another.

Is love really all we need?

The ancient Hebrews did not have separate figures to represent numbers, so they used letters of their alphabet.  As Donald Michael Kraig explains in Modern Magick: “It was believed that if two words had the same numerical total, they had a significant relationship to one another, and in some cases could be considered synonyms. As an example, aheva=13 and echod=13. Therefore aheva (love) and echod (one) are the same. Since in Judaism there is only one God, according to this system, God is Love.”

The Hebrew language is attested from the 10th Century BCE, and later developed into Mishnaic Hebrew (200CE), the Hebrew dialects found in the Talmud (meaning instruction, learning) the central text of mainstream Judaism. If folks then realized that there is a connection between one and all, and this connection was benevolent, how did we go so very wrong?

 “When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away...”

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

There are many different kinds of relationships, the degrees of closeness of which are separated by the act of sex (usually).  Your closest partner is the one you have sex with and your closest friends are the ones you would never have sex with (somehow it is believed by many that sex ruins friendship, which really says very little for sexual relationships.) And not least, all families are related and created through the act of sexual intercourse. As well as connecting, sex conditions.

In the west, monogamy is the accepted form of relationship, all other forms somehow dismissed as dysfunctional or loose.

But monogamy has its dysfunctions too. When was the last time you expected a friend to be faithful? You simply assume they are faithful, or you would not be their friend. If your friends did not share their lives with others, would you not worry about them?

Why is it not so with lovers? 

“Marriage requires a special talent, like acting. Monogamy requires genius.” Warren Beatty

The expression “falling in love” underlines a (mostly unconscious) human belief that we are all walking around the planet completely unaffected by loves gravity, unless serendipity slips a banana skin under our feet.  In truth I believe we waste the idea of love whenever considering the notion that there might be only one other we could share it with. 

We do our selves no service in giving credit to romantic ideals of knights in shining armour or princesses in ivory towers promising happy ever afters. Our priorities in life always change if we grow: I used to fancy Michael J Fox when I was 14, now short-arsed time travellers just don’t do it for me somehow.

So who is to say the one that I meet in my thirties, is going to be the one that suits me in my fifties, or vice versa? I may have three children, with two different men, why should I be judged as being promiscuous simply because of the way I choose to form and maintain relationships? If I look after my children and their spiritual, physical and emotional needs, why should I not have 15 of them from all different nations? Is this not what love would support?

I do respect those who choose to form lasting relationships; I am by no means anti-loving.  But, if as the ancient Hebrew’s proposed, one and love equates the same thing, then I am by default love, and there is no need to fall in with anyone else.