Originally posted on www.thecandycoating.com, though still written by ME. Check it out!
It’s what we want to hear, what we love to say. What we want to think. But is the way we think about love the same as everyone else? Culturally, aren’t there vast differences between what “love” means? What love are we even talking about? Oh, so many questions.
Enter the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The Sapir-Whorf hypothes is a linguistic axiom, or self-evident truth, that our friend Wikipedia defines as: “a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it.”
In other words: The way we talk affects how we think and behave. Quick example to remove any confusion: anthropologists found an island culture that did not have a single word for “war” or “weapon,” and from this could conclusively say that this culture was entirely peaceful. If they don’t have a word for it, how could they do it?
Along these lines, I want to point out something that my Anthropology professor pointed out to me: English only has one word for love. This may not seem strange in itself, until one factors in the Sapir-whorf hypothesis. What does it say about how we think and behave with love that we only have one word for it?
Even more poignantly, what does it mean that our primary conception of this one word is romantic love? The Greeks had three words for love: Agope – which is basically altruism, Filial – which is brotherly love, and Eros – which is what we would call romantic love.
These observations are significant insofar as they indicate our lack of descriptive language when it comes to love. When I say, “I love you,” it is purely context and interpretation that we must rely on. Or even worse, it is just assumed that I mean love in the romantic sense.
Now, I’m not saying coming up with new words for love will solve everything. But I am saying that coming up with new concepts for love would be a good start. Elevating and recognizing other forms of love as equally valid to and just as important as Eros or romantic love would, I think, go a long way in helping us, as a culture, develop a more mature sense of LOVE. And if you don’t believe such a thing is necessary, perhaps you are unaware of the state of things. This is forgivable, but only to an extent! With a 50% plus divorce rate and a penchant towards separation that is so strong it has led psychologists to label Americans as practitioners of “serial monogamy,” it seems clear to me that we don’t actually know what the crap we are doing here in America.
Romantic love is certainly a form of love. It is even a good form of love. Me and romantic love - we tight. However, it is only one facet on the much larger diamond of love. Expecting relationships, marriages, and our love lives to last on only romantic love is like expecting a tripod to stand with only one leg. There is more to it; there has to be, because, as any who have had even the most cursory experience with romantic love can testify, romantic love is unreliable and generally short-lived. A spark may create the flame, but it cannot sustain a flame once lit. A flame untended is a flame doomed to die out. And a flame doomed to die out is hardly a flame worth having at all.
But hey, I’m just the guy writing these things – what do I know? I’m curious what YOU think. So, what do you think?
Friday, September 14, 2007
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Are there any who object to this union?
Mawaige! Lacey, frilly, bell-tolling - oh, yes, mawaige. Immaculately cleaned males dressed in oak-solid suites; Gloriously adorned females wearing dresses directly imported from some magical flower realm. Weddings are nothing if not replete with eye-candy.
This past weekend I went to Minnesota to bear witness and testify to the union of Anisa Smith and Stanfano Ascari. It was a lovely ceremony. Austere in it's simplicity yet dynamic in it's depth and meaning. Then it was done, they was mawwied, and we danced the night away.
In the Baha'i Faith marriage is described as the "fortress of well-being." It is cited as the very bedrock on which a stable and successful society is founded. It is as elementally necessary to our continued progress as fire was to cavemen.
Weddings are a different beast, however. While I appreciate as much as the next man a good rite of passage, and while I love as all do friends and family being near at significant life moments, I can't help but think of the classic anglo-saxon wedding as two parts opulent, one part silly, and one part fun. It's a monstrous machine, functioning now like some terrifying AI of the future, functioning outside of human control and fueled by it's own longevity and weight. It has attained cultural inertia, and the best we poor mortals can do is try to dive out the way without being entirely crushed.
The wedding this weekend made me think of this specifically because it wasn't a denizen of this terrifying beast. It was a breath of fresh air; something of a trend with Bahai weddings that i've attended. Sitting there, listening to the simple collection of readings, read by a diverse number of people each of whom meant something to the couple being wed, I felt a glimpse of hope for this bloated institution. It turns out you don't need a solemn man in a large hat to conduct a lengthy and established ceremony (although solemn men in large hats are not strictly unfavorable either). You don't need pillars of gold leaf and angels performing fly-bys in tight flight formations. You just need two people, their love for each other, and some simple method of connecting with an essence beyond the ordinary world. Song, ceremony, men in large hats - all are aimed at this last goal, and all are acceptable in their own way. But in my experience, God, spirituality, Allah, our emotional selves - whatever you wish to say - is more responsive to sincerity than to lavish displays.
The required vow in the Baha'i Faith is simple: "We will all verily abide by the will of God." And whether or not you believe in God per se, it strikes me as a good idea to base such an ambitious vow of commitment in something beyond humans. Humans fail. Humans falter. Humans are limited. But a concept of the Divine can transcend all these things and last eternally - just as we want, on the most basic level, for the proposed union of two souls to last. Thus, to me at least, weddings are not just a ceremony. They are a pledge to strive, for as long as we live, to seek our nobility over our depravity. Our solidarity over our fractured selves. For surely we have the capacity for both, and at some point we will have chosen by our actions which direction we favor. How much better, then, to choose conciously and wisely, and to do so with someone there to help us when we (as we must) falter.
This past weekend I went to Minnesota to bear witness and testify to the union of Anisa Smith and Stanfano Ascari. It was a lovely ceremony. Austere in it's simplicity yet dynamic in it's depth and meaning. Then it was done, they was mawwied, and we danced the night away.
In the Baha'i Faith marriage is described as the "fortress of well-being." It is cited as the very bedrock on which a stable and successful society is founded. It is as elementally necessary to our continued progress as fire was to cavemen.
Weddings are a different beast, however. While I appreciate as much as the next man a good rite of passage, and while I love as all do friends and family being near at significant life moments, I can't help but think of the classic anglo-saxon wedding as two parts opulent, one part silly, and one part fun. It's a monstrous machine, functioning now like some terrifying AI of the future, functioning outside of human control and fueled by it's own longevity and weight. It has attained cultural inertia, and the best we poor mortals can do is try to dive out the way without being entirely crushed.
The wedding this weekend made me think of this specifically because it wasn't a denizen of this terrifying beast. It was a breath of fresh air; something of a trend with Bahai weddings that i've attended. Sitting there, listening to the simple collection of readings, read by a diverse number of people each of whom meant something to the couple being wed, I felt a glimpse of hope for this bloated institution. It turns out you don't need a solemn man in a large hat to conduct a lengthy and established ceremony (although solemn men in large hats are not strictly unfavorable either). You don't need pillars of gold leaf and angels performing fly-bys in tight flight formations. You just need two people, their love for each other, and some simple method of connecting with an essence beyond the ordinary world. Song, ceremony, men in large hats - all are aimed at this last goal, and all are acceptable in their own way. But in my experience, God, spirituality, Allah, our emotional selves - whatever you wish to say - is more responsive to sincerity than to lavish displays.
The required vow in the Baha'i Faith is simple: "We will all verily abide by the will of God." And whether or not you believe in God per se, it strikes me as a good idea to base such an ambitious vow of commitment in something beyond humans. Humans fail. Humans falter. Humans are limited. But a concept of the Divine can transcend all these things and last eternally - just as we want, on the most basic level, for the proposed union of two souls to last. Thus, to me at least, weddings are not just a ceremony. They are a pledge to strive, for as long as we live, to seek our nobility over our depravity. Our solidarity over our fractured selves. For surely we have the capacity for both, and at some point we will have chosen by our actions which direction we favor. How much better, then, to choose conciously and wisely, and to do so with someone there to help us when we (as we must) falter.
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