Love : An attempt at demystification

Love is perhaps the most mystified concept in this world. Children often believe in magic and miracles and when they grow up they naturally extend this mystique to love. Yet it is apparently also the most common concept. From literature to entertainment, from social institutions to evolution - its this one single concept thats overriding. To Plato, lovers are incomplete halves of a single puzzle, searching for each other in order to become one entity. By giving up their autonomy, they find their true selves. 3000 years later, Freud talks about the same phenomenon using words like sublimation and resistance. But why should the idea of oneness - thats the core of love - be so compelling? Love changes all the physics in the known universe of one's emotions and redraws what is real and what is possible. Perhaps that is where the source of this mysticism lies... It is this mysticism, however, that drives a rationalist to an attempt at theorization, demystification and deconstruction of the concept of love (is it blasphemy, well, maybe!!). What would a taxonomical analysis of this sacred concept look like? First, one admires. The essence of love is fantasy. We fall in love with gods and goddesses of our own devising. We never see them clearly, we never see the forces that drove us to them, but we are predisposed to love them! The next characteristic is, what can be called 'crystallization' - the tendency for someone in love to idealize the subject, imagining him or her to be finer and nobler than any other human being. It is a mental process that draws on everything that happens to form new proofs of the perfection of the loved one. Then one hopes that the feeling will be returned. The paralysing shyness one feels in the presence of the subject of love (in more romantic terms - the beloved!); how important it is to act naturally - but also how difficult; the way the subject's/beloved's kind words can render one speechless; how the alternating current of hope and despair can fry one's nerves; the way the most trivial gesture can devastate a lover one moment and cause bliss the next; how music can convey the wordless depths of love; love's power to whitewash the true nature of the 'beloved'; and the pitilessness of self-doubt and self consciousness that savage one's heart... When This hope and the earlier admiration combine, 'love' is born! After this doubt creeps in with dreadful misgiving, as the love demands proof after proof of affection. When doubt is overcome, the second crystallization occurs, with the mind imagining every act as a proof of love. At this stage the opposite of love is death. If the idealized person should leave the mournful lover assumes it was his/her fault, and that happiness is lost forever! There is no consolation. the mind can no longer attach the idea of pleasure to any pleasurable activity. Love here is the optical illusion which leads to the fatal pistol shot! Certainty, familiarity, complacency - they all lead to pleasant relationships of companionship and good will, but not to the feverish adventure of being in love!! Love is a solitary feeling which exists whether its returned or not, and not the emotional event that takes place between two people. The loves of two people in love with each are seldom the same. Perhaps this is where it draws its mystique from...and perhaps this is why even in an attemot to demystify it, the rationalist cannot help but acknowledge the magic...