Love is a Taught Construct
How do you know how to love? Did you sit wide-eyed in front a large screen as colourful costumed characters hugged one another to a saccharine sound-track so this imbued you with the concept of what love was? Did those cartoon characters explain to you what it is to love? Did their exaggerated voices and crazy antics, followed by the moral of the story teach you what love is?
Perhaps you read about it in love, heard it in songs and studied the many ways in which this ultimate emotion appears and affects people. Chances are that you have been affected by those hugely affecting passages from the great works dedicated to love. Chances are you have been captured by haunting lyrics and catchy jingles which also profess to tell you what love is.
They have all played a part. You may have learned about love from the version churned out by the media, of Hollywood romance, dashing heroes, fair maidens, tarts with golden hearts, the good man who rides to the rescue, the wayward soul saved by love. Love may have been explained to you from the pulpit as a higher love, something which transcends all earthly manifestations, a love so powerful and complete that it sacrificed its only son in order to demonstrate its love for humankind.
This godly love is all around you, it touches each and all and is mighty in its effects. Love may have been learned from furtive fumbles down alleyways, sneaking into bedrooms when so young, the exploration of warm and urgent body parts accompanied by those every so sincere protestations of love.
A haphazard journey through galloping teen years as nothing and everything makes sense all at once. Then again, love might have appeared to you in the form of something small and furry, an unconditional (so long as it was fed) love which was loyal, giving and ever so cute. So many erudite tutors, learned lecturers and wise proponents of what love is.
Love thy neighbour, love yourself, love is all you need, woman in love, it must have been love, crazy little thing called love, to know him is to love him, we found love, how deep is your love? Love is all around us, in us, between us, lifting us up and letting us down. It is everywhere and you may well have been taught by many of the above and more besides as to what love is.
However, love most likely will have been taught to you by those who created you, those two people who came together and through their own pleasure created you. Two people who decided that they would shoulder the responsibility of creating life, nurturing it and bringing a new person into the world.
Those two people accepted many, many responsibilities from such a decision and act. Chief among them was the responsibility of teaching that person what love is. Through their offices they have furnished each and every one of us with the notion of what love is. A deep-seated and visceral understanding of this is how love feels, this is what it looks like, this is what it sounds like.
This is love. From those two people more than anything else we are first grounded in the concept of what love is. This grounding lasts a considerable time and whilst there are other factors to be considered, as I have mentioned above, it is this lesson which is learnt invariably first and the one lesson which resonates beyond all others. So often we are in their hands when it comes to being taught about love. So, what is this taught love? It has so many, many facets.
Love is being told to never trust anybody.
Love is being made to re-write the entire essay because of one spelling mistake.
Love is being sent to stand outside on a cold winter’s day until all three verses of Ode to Autumn are recited correctly.
Love is knowing nothing is ever good enough.
Love is understanding that someone else knows better than you what is best for you.
Love is turning away from the reality.
Love is standing straight against a wall for several hours for speaking out of turn.
Love is for the weak.
Love is being told that when I am gone nobody else will look out for you.
Love is succeeding.
Love is building a wall as high as possible.
Love is trying until it hurts and gaining that final curt nod of approval.
Love is being seen and not heard.
Love is fulfilling your potential and securing that legacy.
Love is hurting you even though it hurts me, but someone in this household has to do it and it won’t be him will it?
Love is reading to yourself than being read to.
Love is living in the shadows and hoping not to be noticed.
Love is being the best.
Love is the preserve of the powerful.
Love is being denied a birthday party because the other children are too stupid.
Love is being undermined in order to prevent conceit.
Love is a begrudged recognition and the injunction to try harder, go further, climb higher, run faster, study longer.
Love is burning your hand but not crying.
Love is don’t tell anybody about our secret.
Love is a righteous beating.
Love is being distant and pretending things never happened.
Love is being sent away.
Love is not being told.
Love is splendid isolation.
Love was taught this way.
17 thoughts on “Love is a Taught Construct”
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I’m sorry (little boy) HG. You deserved none of that, not one bit.
Yes. But the question is does this create an empath or a narcissist? Not as likely to create a normal I would think. A + B does not always equal C. If, as you say, 1 in 6 are narcissists, it’s amazing more research has not been done on this topic. Maybe because there is disagreement on who is what? The ex MMR saw a therapist who travels the world speaking on how to have a better marriage. This guy writes books on the topic. I asked him once if he could diagnose narcissism. “Yes I suppose I could, but I would caution you using labels such as that.”
Both of my parents are narcissists, only one of yours is HG. Yet you are a narcissist and I am an empath. Obviously genetics plays a part. Like two kids in the same bad household, only one turns into a serial killer. It is fascinating but complex.
Anybody who tells you how to have a better marriage and fails to identify to you that your spouse is a narcissist, does not understand narcissism.
You cannot have a better marriage with a narcissist.
Very true. Unfortunately for me and many others, the therapist gets manipulated. I told this man as much, which actually angered him. My current therapist said there was a decent chance that the MMRs therapist is also a narcissist.
I agree.
For as many times as I have read this I still find it heart wrenching. Not out and out abuse that can be seen but the kind that destroys 😔
A question, HG, if I may: would you say that because of the dynamic at play between parents and children, boys may more readily follow their mother’s “teachings” than girls, and conversely?
I know my son is more like me than my daughter is, and I find that daughters (true regarding both mine, and myself) are more prone to go against their mothers.
Does this match your observations in any way?
By conversely (maybe not the right word), I meant: girls would follow their father’s “teachings” more than their mother’s.
I have found what you have written to be the case and also not the case.
I am devastated and angry this happened to you, a precious child.
You are a naturally strong person.
A hero, a good man, and a great man.
Brave, always in control, making the best decisions, protecting us.
They will suffer.
“Love is being told to never trust anybody.
Love is knowing nothing is ever good enough.
Love is understanding that someone else knows better than you what is best for you.
Love is being told that when I am gone nobody else will look out for you.
Love is succeeding.
Love is building a wall as high as possible.
Love is being seen and not heard.
Love is reading to yourself than being read to.
Love is living in the shadows and hoping not to be noticed.
Love is burning your hand but not crying.
Love is don’t tell anybody about our secret.
Love is a righteous beating.
Love is being distant and pretending things never happened.
Love is not being told.”
The above apply to me, doled out by my narcissist mother. My father, most certainly an empath, wasn’t there to counterbalance. He was physically present, but in alcoholic oblivion from the moment he woke up.
My response to the whole situation was to protect myself as much as I could, by seeking refuge in ideal love, I found it in books and films that depicted the Medieval ideal of “courtly love”.
I was just a few centuries late.
* With a period after “ideal love”, not a comma.
The Narcissist’s Bible:
Love is impatient, love is unkind. It is jealous, it is pompous, it is inflated, it is rude, it seeks its own interests, it is quick-tempered, it broods over injury, it rejoices over wrongdoing and rejoices with lies. It bears nothing, believes nothing, hopes for nothing, endures nothing.
Love fails.
It’s savage and it’s cruel
And it shines like destruction
Comes in like the flood
And it seems like religion
It’s noble and it’s brutal
It distorts and deranges
And it wrenches you up
And you’re left like a zombie
It’s guilt edged
Glamorous and sleek by design
You know it’s jealous by nature
False and unkind
It’s hard and restrained
And it’s totally cool
It touches and it teases
As you stumble in the debris
It’s an obsession
– Annie Lennox
I’m a shock trooper in a stupor
Yes I am.
I’m a Nazi shatze
You know I fight for Fatherland.
Little German boy
Being pushed around.
Little German boy
In a German town.
Today your love, tomorrow the world!
– Ramones
This is so sad. It made me tear up. I am so sorry for everything that happened to you when you were little.
Don’t be, you did not do it.