rely on our devotion and our care. As the philosophical fox explains in The Little Prince, a whimsical tale by the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry published during World War II: “You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.”
SEEING WITH THE HEART
Love is an important part of lived human life. This makes it a precious element in our lives we can either nurture or neglect. It takes repeated, wilful acts to benefit the object of our love. As many couples realise after spending several years together, it takes work to make love work, and our reinventions of love give sustenance to the choice we originally made with our heart.
The point is that in love we see and understand with our hearts. By seating love in the heart rather than the brain, we illustrate that loving can be well-founded even though our reasoning may seem baffling. More precisely, we stop reasoning before we’ve even begun. We stop, convinced that the reason is our beloved. We didn’t specifically choose him because he is tall, kind-hearted, smart, or organised, and that’s not why we stay with him. Then again, had he not been smart and kind, we might not have noticed him in the first place, so a partner’s qualities do help form our perception of them.
If someone asks us to, we can easily explain things like how well our partner’s practical, sensible approach to life complements our own dreamier disposition. But when it comes to love, that’s not what counts. It’s not his IQ or his talent as an organiser that makes me willing to do anything for him. What counts is who he is.
The French polymath Blaise Pascal already clarified this several centuries ago in the Pensées, a note-based volume of his thoughts published posthumously in 1670. Here, playing on the word raison, he famously phrases how choices of the heart have their own impenetrable reasoning. Like its English sister, raison has two basic meanings: cause, and common sense. Hence his famous quote, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.”
The inscrutability of love does not mean love is limited to an inner realm inaccessible to others. Even so, what typifies the choices we make on behalf of love is that we put ourselves at risk, at stake – we give ourselves over to someone else. This act of surrender expresses wishes and desires that often surprise us, and others.
Wishful thinking in love is not always symmetrical. Far from it.
With all this in mind, initially it is fair to define love as warm feelings that are cultivated through a certain amount of wilful exertion. We can also acknowledge that giving ourselves over to another person creates powerful ties that bind our choices and our will to that other person, making us responsible for them. Finally, we can establish that love can be mutual and reciprocal, although that is not always the case.
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