Love that remains

Diotima said that love is neither ugly nor beautiful. She also said that, “Love is never completely without resources, nor is he ever rich.” Love continually seeks what is beautiful and continues to seek that which will make him satisfied and happy. Love is not the Beloved but Love is the Lover.

In this age of independence and liberalism, we no longer say that we need anyone to ‘complete’ us, instead we say that we need someone to complement us.

When we look for a potential mate, we often look at their qualities that would complement our own. If we are hot tempered, we look for someone who has a lot of patience. If we are more of a talker, we seek someone who is a listener.

Indeed Love is neither ugly nor beautiful but it is good. That is why we search for it, and we desire that it be ours forever. Love seeks beauty – not just physical beauty – because it does not deem itself beautiful enough. Same with us humans, we seek someone beautiful in a way that we are not. And with that person, we dream to make something beautiful – a beautiful life together, a beautiful family and perhaps beautiful children.

We seek that which is beautiful and good. But sometimes, we do not see ourselves as able to produce that beauty. So whenever we love (Eros) a beautiful person, it seems that loving such a person allows us to ‘conceive’ and give birth to something which is beautiful. It could be a meaningful conversation, a surprising insight, a bubbly daydream, an awakened aspiration for something better or a new desire to be a better person.  

And when a beautiful thing is created with the person that you love, you will cherish that forever. “And whether you are together or apart, you remember that beauty.”

Someone once told me that true love is just that. You treasure the person and what you have. And the time that is yours, that is your ‘forever.’ If you truly love someone and have found true beauty, you are happy merely because such a person exists.

And even if you do not end up together, you will become bitter instead you choose to carry in your heart the beauty that you created together. It is a love that remains even when the togetherness has faded away.

As a song of Dido says:

“Do you remember telling me you’d found the sweetest thing of all. You said one day of this was worth dying for, so be thankful you knew her at all but it’s no more.”     

But it is different in a situation where infatuation consumes the person. We often say that a person who is infatuated does not see rightly. That person only sees what he wants to see. He only sees a preconceived idea or image of the person he is infatuated with.

What he desires is not necessarily what is real. If he does not see the real beauty of the person, then the beauty he will conceive and give birth to is not of real beauty. And soon he will see that what they have created was only superficial, beautiful only in the surface but not underneath.

These are couples we see that are just going through the motions of being in love, but do not truly love each other. They are more in love with the idea of love. And when they see the deceitfulness of their ‘love’, they become bitter and hard. They see their time together as a waste of time, effort and care.

Admiration is much nearer to Eros but still not the same level. As we said earlier, we do not deem ourselves truly and completely beautiful. Therefore, it is inevitable that we find people whom we admire and whose qualities we want to emulate. But even if we are attracted to their beauty it does not necessarily mean that we ant to create something beautiful with them, we just want the beauty that is theirs to be ours too.

Eros is therefore loving and seeking Beauty and its forms but it does not stop there. We desire to be conceived by it and give birth to something beautiful. We seek for a beautiful and good person to love and create beautiful things with. And our love will determine what legacy we leave behind.