March 2022
This month, we asked our writers to consider the true nature of love
How the flames go out
Jack Daly
MSMU Class of 2025
When people think of the pitfalls of the love between the sexes, they might be inclined to envision something like Paolo and Francesca, two medieval lovers punished forever among the ranks of the lustful for their excessive passion in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. However, the time of Divine Comedy is long past and modern days require modern vices, in addition to those already widespread. Perhaps the largest distinction to be found within the old and new kinds of chastity is that while Paolo and Francesca were carried away on the mighty winds of passion, the younger generation seems subject to winds that are far more sporadic.
Throughout most of history, some noticeable degree of lust was seen as if healthy, or simply the status quo among young people, particularly among young men. An appetite for love was thought to be part of a youthful zeal for life; for better or worse, it was part of maturation. Any worries about the excesses of adolescence were often assuaged by the assumption that these tendencies would abate, and untutored cads would become upstanding members of society.
Within the last century, or likely even longer, the old standards often taken for granted suddenly came into question, and the spirit of licentiousness ruled the ensuing age. Attitudes were changed, priorities shifted, and change after change occurred. The Sexual Revolution of the sixties is typically blamed for the sea of change, but there had been eras of loose morals foreshadowing it for quite some time. What is unique about the last fifty years is how effectively any reaction against the current times is dismissed as backwards.
Today what is expected, or indeed considered healthy, among the younger generations would have been unmentionable in polite society not so long ago. In fact, such conduct is widely seen as rather mundane; it is only the previously unimaginable deviations that garner any attention or excitement within the fashionable set. It seems as though the most celebrated love stories of the day are not what people do or feel in love, but rather who can be in love with whom.
Before any aged hippies sit back and bask in the victory of ‘free love,’ it must be pointed out that the only thing these changes have really accomplished is the reduction of human sexuality to purely materialistic terms. Beautiful concepts, such as ‘true love,’ an idea which seems to have been simultaneously ridiculed and praised for centuries, are all but erased; everyone is not only allowed but required to construct their own definition of love or be left with none at all. It is chaos.
The excesses of modernity would be disordered enough, but recently there has developed a new and unforeseen turn of the screw. In the past couple of years, there has been report after report about how young people in first world countries are becoming less sexually active. This obviously can’t be attributed to any religious revival; rather it would seem that the free love plot has played itself out. Excitement and pleasure are fleeting things, and any promise to hold onto them forever in our earthly life has shown itself to be totally empty.
If chastity can be defined as a healthy respect for one’s body and those of others, then departures from that virtue can be identified as both the desire to use oneself in excess and the wish to reject one’s body entirely. As with all cases of vice, there is a certain bipolar quality, two extremes between which lost souls swing.
In our lost culture, people are left always chasing the highest highs and falling to the lowest lows. Moments of intensity give way to feelings of shame and self-disgust, feelings that we have lost any way to process. Most people try to bury these emotions in more indulgence. Many succeed in dismissing them, but plenty others are swallowed by them. These emotions eat away at one’s subconscious until their hosts feel uncomfortable in their own skin. At some level, those afflicted by this guilt from the back of their minds have come to hate their bodies. They view themselves not as wonderfully and fearfully made, but as minds trapped in a fleshy prison, an inconvenient weight that connects them to little more than pain and hunger.
Gone is the time of devotion and service, of wild romance and the giving of oneself. The story of today is that of the ever oscillating cycle that moves always from pleasure to despair and back again. Love reduced merely to the physical has lost all of its grandeur, and desire has lost any element of longing. It is now no more than an itch to scratch until it bleeds.
It is often said that youth and ignorance are synonymous. People tend look at young adulthood as a time of discovery, where mistakes are guaranteed to be made. At the same time, it is a shameful mistake if today’s generation spends its best days scoffing at the passionate love that ought to be its greatest treasure. The realm of romance is very much in need of a renaissance, and a new healthy attitude with a holistic view of love and sex.
Such a pillar of human life should not be allowed to go on so misshapen. While it can never be assured that humans will behave perfectly, it is important that people, on an individual level, correct how they are living, as that is the only surefire way for them to ever see any change exacted. The hope is that if enough people fix their own errors in this regard, then others will follow suit until there is at last built a culture of genuine and well-ordered love. This is, perhaps, an overly optimistic outlook, but many tend to take up such a disposition when discussing their hopes for the most delightful subject known to man. Maybe we can expect a colder future where love suffers from being devalued in the name of either freedom or morals, but let us always long for the time when love shall create only more love in turn.
Read other articles by Jack Daly
The little plant
McKenna Snow
MSMU Class of 2024
Sharing can be difficult. At least, though, you get half or so of whatever it is you’re sharing. Even harder it must be to give something away. Once you’ve given it away, it is not yours anymore, it belongs to the person you’ve given it to. And most of the time, the more you give something away, the less of it you have.
However, there are two things I know of that don’t operate this way: a little plant at my house, and love.
I’ve moved a lot in my childhood. There are certain things we’ve carted around for years, the little plant being one of them. It lives in this white pot, with some blue flowers painted on it. It’s a variation of the pothos plant, so its leaves are waxy, very individual, and a bright, pretty green. It is long, vine-like, and stringy, and also toxic to cats and birds (I grew up with dogs for pets, so this was never a concern). It is very bushy and full of leaves in the pot, and its vines trail down as long as we allow them to grow.
Carting this plant around for years never struck me as a big deal until sometime in middle school. I started noticing that around the house, we have other long plants exactly like this one, in other pots. They looked newer, in more modern pots you’d get at a store. I wanted to decorate my room with plants, so I asked my mom if I could have one of the pothos plants for my room.
Instead of just letting me have one of the plants, she showed me something. She took me to the white potted plant, with scissors, and showed me a section of one of the vines that didn’t have leaves on it. She cut this vine and told me to put the cut vine in a bottle of water, and to leave it in a windowsill.
She told me the vine needed at least a few months in the water, maybe six, because pothos plants have a great adaptability to grow new roots when submerged in water. Once they have grown lots of new roots, you pour out the water, get a pot with good dirt, and plant it.
I took good care of that cut pothos. I refilled the water as the little cut vine drank it up, and watched the roots slowly but surely grow. Eventually, I was able to pick out my own pot at the store, and I planted the pothos. It grew all throughout high school, its leaves stretching out to face wherever the most light was coming from.
It grew long and happy, and now it is with me in college. It sits at the top of my dresser, trailing down the side of it, facing the window. Now its top is bushy and lively, just like the older pothos.
In the friendships that I’ve made at the Mount, there have been a few times I’ve cut a long piece of my pothos off, put it in a water bottle, and given it to my friends as a gift. For me, it is a deeply personal gift because of its connection to my family and how long I’ve been taking care of my pothos. And now, the friends who have the water bottles with the pothos have been able to experience the roots growing throughout past semesters.
I admire the pothos because of how much it shows what love acts like. Love, like a plant, grows, wants sunlight and truth, and wants a sort of water that keeps it alive. And it is also capable of being cut, by a knife or scissors or some sharp experience, and to be submerged for months on end—only to grow even more.
The hardiness of love, then, should be thought of. How incredible is it that we have a visual such as a little plant, that has endured many changes and moves, many cuts and drownings, to show us how much love is capable of enduring. Love is stoic, and love is resilient. Love, like the plant, embraces the hardships, and wants to grow from them. Eventually, it can be taken out of the water and put in fresh soil. How good is it that love is this way, too!
Selfishness and complaining have no place in this submersion or trial, but instead asks a selfless question: how can we grow from this? How can we grow in patience for one another while we wait for new roots? Our old, comfortable vines have been severed from us, but with love we can overcome these difficulties. Real love, then, does not abandon or sugarcoat when something becomes difficult or something needs to be confronted. Instead, it carefully ensures that the other is in the sunlight, the truth, getting the nutrients and water needed to healthily go on. Love wills the good of the other, whether the lover benefits from it or not; it is not a fleeting feeling, but an ongoing choice, to care for the other in some way or another.
Better still is the plant’s ability to share, to grow, to be given away and yet to increase. Love, too, never really decreases the more you give it to others. In my experience, it only grows. Real love is disinterested in what it can gain for itself; rather, it is entirely interested in how it can give to others. It is willing to be cut, to suffer, and to change, for the good of another person. Sometimes real love hurts, and sometimes it feels comfortable and happy. But the good news is that love is not rooted in feelings, but in an ongoing decision to want what is best for the other person, regardless of circumstance.
This little plant at my house was a wedding present for my parents, who recently celebrated 27 years of marriage. Because of its giving and thriving nature, the plant is much more than a vine to me; it is a reminder of all that love is capable of enduring, doing, and becoming, the more it is given away to others.
Read other articles by McKenna Snow
Science of love
Emmy Jansen
MSMU Class of 2023
It’s 2020, on a warm December night. I’m sitting in my office chair at the front desk of the assisted living facility I work at in Central Virginia. It’s a slow day, since there are no visitors for me to check in and out as they visit their family members. The phones seldom ring during the dinner hour so I pass the time between calls with a book propped up. Every few pages, I scribble some profound thought verbatim onto a sticky note and wedge it between the sheets of paper. A nursing attendant much older than I am walks by on her way to retrieve a resident for his nightly shower. She glances over the counter and asks me about what I’m reading. "How To Avoid Falling In Love With A Jerk", the cover screams in bold, colorful letters, announcing my past predicaments for the whole world to see. "You’re too young to know anything about that," she states without question, before joking that she should borrow the book when I’m done due to her most
recent divorce.
I will admit that it was a very strange experience to read a book about relationship advice when I haven’t even been in the relationship scene for five years. It felt a little presumptive. So many other people have experienced bad relationships much older than I am now, how can I attempt to avoid all of those at nineteen? Those are life shaping experiences that make you into the person you are, am I really too scared to face them?
The fact is that I was given the book by force, not by choice, after a very toxic relationship and I didn’t actually finish it until August of 2021: I started dating another ‘jerk’, the technical term from the book, in early 2021 and didn’t like recognizing his actions within the pages so I simply ignored them. It was an immensely helpful book, not just for my romantic relationships but in understanding how humans relate to each other. It covered how childhood and early family life impacts the adult, the cycle of relationships over time, and how to combat issues while in a relationship. So I highly recommend it to any person interested in strengthening their own relationship, in a period of waiting, or to anyone suffering from past romantic experiences. I think you can only benefit from this book.
When I sat down to write this article, I was thinking about the emotion of love. I could tell sweet stories of friendship, relate advice from older couples, or craft the story of my parents’ marriage for you. But, of course, when it came to it, all I could think about was the science of love, how relationships form and the emotional intelligence involved in bonding. Dare I say that everyone has experienced some form of love in their life, whether from family, friends, strangers, or romantic lovers. I won’t spin you a sappy tale you already know, then. But how does ‘love’ work? Because at times, it seems all but magical.
There are different ways to experience love. One of the most interesting things I’ve learned about love is the five "love languages" that each person experiences to a different level: physical touch, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, and gift giving. Your dominant mode of affection is the way you prefer to give and receive love. When someone claims that their partner doesn’t love them or won’t show it, their partner actually might be showing them love in a different way than they’re used to. I’m a major words of affirmation person, but I once dated a guy who had that as his lowest mode of affection. He absolutely hated complimenting me or expressing his feelings because his dominant mode was quality time. In his eyes, his actions spoke louder than words ever could so he didn’t need to repeat himself by telling me everything he’s already shown me. Unfortunately, we couldn’t reconcile this and our relationship ended, but partners frequently can
adjust to express and receive love in the most adequate ways. When you’re aware that someone’s love language is physical touch, you might congratulate a big accomplishment with a hug instead of with words of praise because the physical aspect will be more powerful for them in receiving your love.
But the experience of love is still broader than that. In dorm conversations, I realized that we desire different things from love and affection. My roommate was attracted to the type of guy who would tease and joke with her, because that was how her parents had showed each other affection growing up. I wanted a guy who would make me laugh, and not a girly giggle, but true gut laughter. That had always been how my family said "I love you." We’re all on this journey, but we’re taking different paths.
But what reading this book showed me most of all is that at the end of the day, all we truly want is to love and be loved. I heard a priest in a homily say, "Joy is being with the ones you love and knowing that the ones you love are cared for." We get happiness and security from our core sense of identity, but our relationships give us joy because we experience the happiness of ourselves and someone else. I’ve often heard the phrase, "Find someone who completes you," but this infers that by ourselves, we are not whole. This idea is false, and anyone who believes it should read the above mentioned book. In reality, love is finding someone who makes you feel more whole even when you’re by yourself. You become more yourself when you’re loved and give love completely and entirely, whether that be romantic, platonic, or familial. So, give some love today in all of the different modes and see yourself become more whole without having ever been incomplete.
