What Is a Spousal Love?

What is (spousal) love

In this essay, I wish to answer this apparently simple question: What is (spousal) love? I don't mean by this question: “what is the best way to show love to your wife or husband?” Or even “How does ideal (“Platonic” or otherwise) love feel like?” The question I want to answer is the following: What is love in itself? What is love in its everyday sense, as it lends itself to our experience independently from how we want rationalize it?

My way of answering this question is by imagining a story (= a scenario) and asking questions about the possibilities which the situations of that story reveal. The story itself is just an imaginary one; but the possibilities it shows are realistic and will eventually pave the way towards an authentic understanding of what love is in itself.

What do you need to know for you to understand my "account" of love? Basically, you need nothing! Only a little patience to read the whole essay.

Let us start then!

Suppose that God created you in an empty rocky wilderness where there are no other humans other than yourself. Let us call this wilderness “Rockistan”. You have everything you need for eternal survival in Rockistan: food, water, life-preserving temperature and a body which is exactly like your current body except that it is immortal.

Try to imagine how your life would be like in Rockistan. Days are passing by but things do not seem to change. The same rocks, the same foods, the same natural scenes, and the same everything- Everything is the same except for your feelings that are constantly falling in the dreary abyss of fear, anxiety and boredom.

Let us ask and focus on the question why you should experience fear and anxiety in this context. You look around you and you discover that everything surrounding you is both DIFFERENT from you and RESISTENT to what you are.

What does it mean for rocks to be different from you? Well, one fundamental difference between you and a rock is that you know...