What is love?

The other day, I dreamt that I was back with my ex-boyfriend. Upon waking, I felt a wave of contradiction. It had been months since we broke up, and I was certain I had moved on. Yet, there he was, his image as vivid as if it were just yesterday that we went to the movies or for ice cream. I started to wonder if, deep down, I still had feelings for him; I even questioned why I had broken up with him. Despite being young, I dare say that I truly felt something for him. It was my first serious relationship, and I entered it believing I had a clear understanding of love and relationships. 

I come from a middle-class family with roots in the lower class. My parents experienced challenging childhoods, both economically and emotionally. They grew up in large families where money was scarce, sometimes insufficient even for food. There was a certain family nucleus, largely thanks to religion, but few displays of affection and more instances of violence. My mother essentially raised her siblings, being the eldest daughter in a highly patriarchal society. Both my parents had to start working from a young age to support their families. They don't recall a clear childhood, as it was blurred by my father's work in construction to earn extra money and my mother selling her few toys and falsifying her birth certificate to get a job at a supermarket.

Neither did they have a proper adolescence, as they met in high school at a point where their primary goal was to escape their homes. They saw marriage and starting a family as the quickest and most viable option, leading to my eldest brother's birth when they were only 18. I came along five and a half years later. Deep down, I believe my parents never truly loved each other; they just saw each other as a means to move forward from their burdensome realities. This is evident from their divorce when I was only three years old. Despite this, I have always felt loved by both of them. I'm aware that their life experiences make it difficult for them to express affection directly. Their way of showing love was mostly through material things. As a child, my room was filled with toys and other unnecessary items, but if you asked me how often I received a hug or an "I love you" in a way that didn't feel forced or strange, I could count them on one hand.

However, this situation has evolved over the years, particularly with my mother, with whom I increasingly dare to discuss my emotions. The point of mentioning all this is that, despite and because of my family history, I believed I had enough knowledge about relationships to form an idea of the kind of love I wanted in my life, or at least what kind I didn't want—one devoid of warmth and affection, like the one my parents had.

 Anyway, after my dream, I realized that I had made many mistakes in my relationship and ended it more out of uncertainty than clarity. I still don't know what love truly is. My first instinct was to search the internet for "What is love?" But most of the articles I found were about mundane things, leaving me with an incomplete answer—“how to build a strong relationship,” “how to pick your life partner,” “sexuality within a relationship.” I'm actually looking for something deeper. I'm looking for what poets write about, what musicians sing about, and what painters illustrate. All those sensations, emotions, and experiences that artists have tried to portray and describe for centuries.

The first work that comes to mind is "Romeo & Juliet" by William Shakespeare, a classic. However, I immediately dismiss it because it depicts love at its most extreme, combined with violence that ultimately affects not only the main couple but also those around them. Then I think of "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë, but again, it seems more of a reference to toxicity and abuse rather than love. Later, "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel García Márquez comes to mind, a story that equates love with a plague and celebrates it as a phenomenon that transcends age. While I agree with this portrayal, I still feel it presents an incomplete picture. For all these stories remind me in some way of what Arthur Rimbaud, one of the French cursed poets, said:

“Love...no such thing. Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together, that's not love. That's stupidity or selfishness or fear. Love doesn't exist. Self interest exists, attachment based on personal gain exists, complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented, that’s certain.”

The last line, perhaps, is where the whole point lies: "Love has to be reinvented." Considering this was written by Rimbaud in the 1800s, let’s look at the relationship between the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the following century. It was a type of relationship that, in simple terms, could be considered free or open because its foundations lay in the complex desire to go against what Sartre considered bourgeois love.

"In the end, love is the desire to possess the beloved's freedom as a freedom that is experienced as determined, so that it is both a free subject and an object subjugated by the lover."

For Sartre, this desire to possess the other's freedom stems from the confusion between object and person, despite there being a substance that separates them—consciousness. While objects show total indifference to your being, people have the ability to reflect upon you. An object will never judge you or incorporate you into its consciousness, but a subject will. This is why humans classify each other based on multiple attributes and definitions, as we do with things, in order to operate among ourselves. However, according to Sartre, the problem with labeling others lies in considering the entirety of their being to have the same nature as an inert material. Inevitably, we will be perceived by others in an objectified manner. Within this phenomenology, every encounter between people is hostile and threatening, as they reveal aspects of themselves in their respective consciousnesses that they previously did not know. Therefore, feelings of pride and shame are based on recognizing that another being is observing and judging you, and accepting that you have become an object. Your being is limited to the extent that you maintain relationships with others who need to know and define who you are to incorporate you into their mental world.

With this in mind, love is a concrete manifestation of this phenomenon—the longing that drives consciousness to possess the other as an object so that they love you as you wish to be loved and encourage you to see yourself as possessed in the way the other wants you to be. In Sartre’s words, "To love is, in essence, the project of being loved," because when you tell someone "I love you," you don't expect a "thank you" in return, but rather an "I love you too," as if constantly reaffirming, "Do you love me?"

Considering all this and returning to Rimbaud, I’ll propose that loving should be reinvented as an abstract union that transcends the limits of identity and individuality. Within this union, we should be able to accompany and understand both ourselves and others as ever-changing subjects, with no limits, enabling any possibility, even the worst, even death. This does not mean that love must be unconditional, we must be able to reanalyze the idea of continuing to love someone or not. This perspective leaves aside mundane matters such as sex, money, fear or selfishness, focusing solely on the contemplation of what differentiates us from objects—consciousness in its purest and most realistic form.

Under this concept, the only relationship I know that truly embodies this is not that of Beauvoir and Sartre, but one that dates back to New York in the '70s, between Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. They supported each other in their worst moments, when they moved on to the “Big Apple” pursuing an artistic career, when they had no place to live, no money for food, and were trying to discover themselves as artists and as persons, experimenting in every way you could imagine. Even when jealousy and domination touched them, when Robert discovered his homosexuality, and Patti revealed her desire to become a mother and form a family with another man, they continued to love each other until the end. Patti was by Robert's side in the hospital when he inevitably died of AIDS in 1989.

In the end, we have found what poets write about, what musicians sing about, and what painters illustrate.