What Is the Point of Love?

It can feel like an unfair topic. Either we lack love, at which point we hardly need to hear further reminders of what we are missing. Or we have love, and its advantages are surely evident.

But when we ask what is the purpose of love, both when we search for it and when we have secured it, we may benefit from a more intimate understanding of its role: the native deficiencies it can help us to correct, the ways in which it enhances us, why its disappearance can so devastate us.

A Route to Self-Knowledge

It is, strangely, very hard to understand ourselves when we are merely by ourselves. Self-knowledge is – necessarily – a two-person business. We need another’s mirroring function to know the shape of our own characters. It’s only when they start to laugh that we understand we said something funny. Or because they got irritated that we sense we crossed a boundary. Or because they were moved by our story that we register we might have suffered a wound. We need them to interpret for us that our irritable manner probably hides some kind of fear, or that our grumpiness might mean we’re exhausted or are in urgent need of an orange juice.

We rely on their interest to help us be interested in ourselves. The amount we feel we have to say to another person is determined by how much we unconsciously sense they are able to understand. One person can ask us what we did for the weekend and our minds will go blank; another can ask the same question and catalyse a succession of memories and thoughts.

It’s the other’s comfort with our oddity and complexity that gives us the confidence to go deeper. We open up new doors inside us if someone can sweetly say ‘carry on…’ when we are tempted to trail off midway through a thought; they lend us the encouragement to examine a difficult moment of childhood by remarking sympathetically: ‘That must have been so hard for you when…’

A Route to Self-Acceptance

It can be hard – left to our own devices – to put up with being, always, us. We know so much about what is awful, compromised and embarrassing in our natures. We could cut together a film that, if it were ever released, would damn us forever. We have direct acquaintance with some ghastly pieces of information. We can’t forget what happened in childhood, or the messier moments of adolescence, or the dreadful mistakes we’ve made over the decades, especially around love and work. How not to give way to unbounded self-loathing given the regrets and delusions; how not to despair at the scale of our weaknesses and compromises? Why me, and why this again, we may wonder in front of the mirror at the start of another day, on seeing our heavy, sad, cowardly eyes looking back at us.

That’s, in part, why we need love so urgently: someone to help staunch the torrent of self-doubt and lend us another perspective on our natures. They don’t need to think we are angels – in fact, such idealisation would be merely another hurtful misunderstanding and a contributor to fresh loneliness. We don’t want them to think us amazing; we need them to judge us as fools but – crucially – as loveable fools. We want them to bring a charitable eye to bear on our silliness. We long for them to spot a basic decency beneath the gruff exterior; to register the efforts we make behind the scenes; to remember the child in us; to know that we do – for the most part, despite some awful lapses – fundamentally mean rather well.

A Salve for Paranoia

Alone, the mind gnaws away at possibilities for disaster. Alone in the night, the fears build up without mercy: why wouldn’t they be trying to get us fired? Couldn’t the business plausibly go under? What if someone broke into the server? Why wouldn’t everyone hate us? Why isn’t catastrophe coming for us today? Fear runs unchecked through an isolated mind.

But with another body next to us, a little of the terror abates. Gently, they push back against our fateful certainties. Are you sure they said they despise you? Why would they try to ruin your life? I don’t think it’s likely that they’d remember that conversation after three decades…

Maybe there is – after all – another way of looking at the crisis. Perhaps things aren’t on the verge of disintegration. The world might still have some mercy and patience in it.

The lover may not, in the course of this life-saving work, be saying anything dramatically new.  We might have said the same thing to ourselves, but with no effect whatsoever. What matters is that they – another mind – are saying it; that their reasoned intelligence has pointed them to another, less awful conclusion. That they are ‘not us’ and they think it’s going to be OK. That they don’t see a straight line between ourselves and a prison or a morgue.

Like the very scared mollusc we are, we ask them to say it again: are you sure it might be OK? Do you really think I didn’t do anything bad? And, with a weary tenderness (it might be 3.45 a.m. and this might have started an hour ago), they might say: yes, I’m sure. I’m really sure. You don’t have anything to worry about. Now turn over and go to sleep, you silly goose.

And with such a divine command, the raging waters of panic recede and the fires of torment dampen. We’re going to be able to sleep a little more now. The day ahead will be saved. We hold their hand very tightly indeed.

A Parental Function

To the outside, we’re robust, a proper adult, perhaps deep into middle age. The lover knows us, in part, always as a child. They know how worried we get before a meeting. They know we didn’t listen to anything our colleague said because we were anxious about an odd feeling in our stomach. We’ve told them how much we love the noise at take-off or the bubble bath in the hotel.

A parent doesn’t mind when their five-year-old child says: there’s a tiger under the bed. Please can we go and look? They tell them: ‘OK, you watch the door. I’m going to go and inspect’. No one at school needs to know this. Nor do they need to know how long parent and child spent in the toyshop or talking about koala bears, or how much they enjoyed the high-pitched voice the child loves to speak in when it’s in a light-hearted mood. Outside in the playground, the child can pretend to be brave and ‘normal’.

Decades later, the good lover takes over – in  part – the parental function, holding all the sweetness, strangeness, panic and tenderness that’s inside us all (much to our ongoing surprise and disbelief). It could sound regressive – but only ever to someone who stuck to an immature view of what true adulthood might entail and require.

Because we Get Tired

We need them because we cannot always be well, because we are exhausted, because we run out of ideas for how to solve things, because we’re unable to fight back against our enemies or make our case again with a family member. We need them because they had a rest earlier today, and so they have the strength to carry us (as it were), after the long drive back, from the car into our bed.

A Check on Our Worst Impulses

There is a cautionary function too. They know we speak a bit too much and too loudly. Or not enough, and too modestly. They understand our tastes for slightly overly garish colours. They’ve observed our tendencies to get too excited about new projects at work. They know we need to visit the dentist. Without frightening us, while leaving us enough dignity to marshal the strength to make a change, they hint that we need to improve. They don’t – importantly – love us ‘just as we are’ (those are never our true friends). They are on hand to nudge us, very tenderly, towards our better possibilities.

The Body Helps the Mind

It’s not sex as a physical act. It’s the acceptance it symbolises. They hold us, they surrender with and to us, they witness us at a very unusual moment; we do this fundamentally very peculiar thing with and to them – and it colours everything: how patient we’ll be at the traffic lights, how much we esteem ourselves, how we respond when someone forgets an important meeting. Right now, so much may have gone wrong, but eight hours ago, in the darkness, we were held, we were contained, we were allowed to let ourselves go, we had the ultimate license. So we can be good boys and girls; we don’t need always need to have our way. We can be calm and confident because of all that happened in the darkness.

We Stay Humble

No one can stay heroic in the other’s eyes for too long in love. A relationship continuously introduces us to our most difficult and daft sides. The only people who can think that they are easy to live with are those who have no one to live with. In a shared space, we shed illusions: that we might be normal, that we aren’t – at points – very unreasonable and very impatient.

And so, when we consider what is the purpose of love, we learn about the importance of laughter, about having to try harder, about rupture and repair – and about our constant need to be forgiven for our normally very base but occasionally very adorable humanity.