Faking Love

My friend and I were at a gathering and my friend was busy asking some questions to another guy he had just met. I thought later that my friend wasn’t really interested but only faked it. I reserved my thought process for later. I do not believe now, that he faked it. He didn’t fake it but showed what perfected will, wills for. Pure Intentions perfect the will without relying on biases.



The biases and stereotypes that ‘we have to have something in common to enjoy our conversation and be friends’ are dispelled. A perfected will eventually manifests into perfected love. Fancy love is filled with fancy things: colors, cakes, juices, gifts, kisses and smiles. Not that we don’t need fancy love, it is often and in the beginning, an expression of loving someone in the first place .But true love endures. It endures lack of motivation to love.





Mrs. Dolores, whose son is the scout captain in college shows off her son as her trophy. Everywhere she goes people talk about her son. She loves her son and because of this new found pride, she is motivated to love him more.





Passions(sensibilities or senses that arise out of our sensitive appetite of our Soul) play a prominent role in our love. Everyone enjoys a funny movie but not so much a history movie. Love has to be cultivated for a history movie. It has to be appreciated that history aids our understanding of the perspective of the times and the very journey of the lives of men. History records the journey of the ordinary days, audacities and atrocities in time. This phenomenon is not an emotion per se such as fear, thrill or anxiety that we can relate to as in any other horror movie.





The appreciation of why history is essential can make history fascinating and studying the complex lives of men, a form of love. But it’s not all jokes and pranks. Our will has to point to appreciation than to enjoyment. It is very easy to see why you are not enjoying a history movie and call it boring (if the movie is genuinely not boring). Perhaps your will points to your senses and your senses expect a tickle, a prank, a fight, an adrenaline rush, a surprise or a sexual overture. The same reason we don’t enjoy academic books on philosophy as opposed to bestsellers and cheap watered down cosmetic imitations of the same. (Read: All of the self-helps books today are cheap imitations of the teachings of Classic Philosophy and Christian Philosophy and Stoicism)





This is the same reason we don't visit the sick. We visit Disney land, for why should we be alone at home when it’s so much fun on the rides? Nobody desires living alone or loneliness. We don't visit the sick, for how can we enjoy visiting old, clumsy, uncouth dregs? But they are essentially alone and lonely. All they want often is just someone's company. Nobody visits them in years. Imagine if you sat next to one and the thought running through her minds is: someone has come leaving Disney lands, clubs, pubs, and come here to visit me. Someone cares. I do exist for him. I am a person. I am wanted.





Now to actually swim the tide and really make it to the old age home, your will has to point not to your emotions but point to a part of you that identifies with loneliness and being alone. This is part in you called reason. It does not ask what one feels but what one ought to do or what is right. This identification may be personal(first type) of having known what loneliness feels like and never willing that anyone else undergo the same(compassion) or the identification(second type which is knowledge: empirical or rational) that certain things are good like sharing and caring and certain things, the absence of good(bad) like conceit and deceit regardless of having undergone it .





If you think of an old woman and your will points to emotions, perhaps usually, only ‘dirty’, ‘smelly’, ‘old’, ‘ragged’ and ‘morbid’ will come to your mind. These are the same as a ‘rancid food’, ‘animal waste’, ‘crow shit’, ‘feces’ and ‘stench of sewage’ that makes us run away from it just as strawberry, vanilla and chocolate lure us towards itself.





There is an objective resistance to suffering, to what our passions dislike. Anything that involves sweat, tears, pain and hardship is rebelled by the passions in spite of their ends being good. Anything that involves ease, comfort, gratification convenience is invited by our passions even if the ends are bad. This is due to the fall of Man. We are but fallen creatures.





Man is reason and passions. Passions are overbearing. They often take man away from reason. This is at the center of the doctrine of selfishness. What do I choose? What does my heart will? does my heart will that I visit a sick lady? Deep inside all of us will to bear good fruit. But again we wish to do enjoyable good, something our passions invite and not rebel. Again, passions get the better of us. We talk ourselves into thinking, "hey I am a nice guy. I like to befriend people" and then we befriend a guy who either roots for the same football club as we do or who loves mark twain as we do, who plays tennis as we do or who listens to Metallica and has a stash of new age rock. Again our passions play a dominant role. We go with what we enjoy. We call it love.





Now when you really begin to make an effort to actually walk across the classroom and say hello to a puny little guy wearing spectacles scribbling algebraic expression and say: what are you doing? He answers, I am doing the homework. You are aware that no one is going to do it for another week. You ask him what he likes and he says mathematics and Electronics. You were expecting he would say formula one and Liverpool.





I begin to wonder now what would make me interested in walking across to a person and introduce myself to another reluctant and a less interesting prospect as this nerd. The object behind this action is either some deep seated interest or extra ordinary love. There is no other. The visit to an old lady, to make another person feel the same dignity that has been bestowed equally by God on each of us, is either driven by extra ordinary love or a certificate of having accomplished social work.





Watching a history movie can either be grooming a special love for appreciating history or stalking an astonishingly pretty girl who watches such movies and wishing to cross her ways in the pretext of love for history. The action of going against your passions, of what you don't enjoy has only two motives: conceit or caritas i.e. love. There is no other.





If I was talking to the guy, I was either feeling he doesn’t share our academic field, does not share passion for books, for discussing a city, and perhaps feels left out and unwanted. At this moment he is not very different from the old lady who is left unwanted. The only difference being he can close himself in his own world of materials believing that he doesn't need friends. He feels perhaps he has his bike, his oil rig job or his cigarette. Materialism will soon wipe out any traces of ‘unwantedness’. He will have a world within himself. Soon, feeling unwanted which materialism allowed him to obliterate will slowly turn into feeling of hatred: who needs these bookish people who only talk about books





He is not different from the old lady except that the old lady has nothing to call her own. She cannot hide behind materials. When the person is very introvert and doesn’t feel the desire to talk or be candid and yet you take an interest in knowing his job, his company, the clientele, it is either because you wish to have a referral in the Oil Rig or you want him to feel wanted, to feel that people do want him to talk about his job, to talk about his love for his bike. It is not ‘faking’ but pointing your will from emotions (what makes me happy) to reason (I ought to make another happy)





I call this selfless becomes one has no vested interests in it. Your objective is to make another happy. You do it for love. You may not like to know about Oil Rigs but learn to love it. Love teaches, if your will can be commanded to point to good and not to emotion. A mother does not like to stay awake all night to care for her sick child. It’s not her hobby. She doesn't wait for the child to fall sick in order that she can stay up all night. She learns to stay awake and sacrifice for the good of her child. She longs to sleep too.





But she points her will to goodness rather than emotions. Her emotions of deprived sleep and her longing for a comfortable bed is not very different from what we feel when we have to befriend someone less enjoyable, eat something that is not cooked well, visit the sick, watch good cinema as opposed to popular cinema that may be boring initially because of our overbearing reliance on sensation (comedy,horror ect).





But a mother’s love is pure and hence her will is perfected in order to choose good over what her passions desire. It would be very rare to hear of a mother with an impure intention of suffering for a child because someday her child will be rich and take care of her. At that moment, she only wishes her child to be well and be freed from the sickness. It would be rare to hear of a wife who wishes her husband wake up from a coma so that he would have just enough strength to sign all of his wealth in her name. At that time, she only wishes her husband to come alive for her need to be loved.





Impure intentions destroy the dignity of the person. If the mother does suffer for her child in order that one day she will have her rewards, her child ceases to be a person and becomes an investment just as Mrs. Dolores, perhaps overjoyed in her self-indulgence, began to perceive her scout son as a trophy. The comatose husband is the wife’s insurance package in an event if her intentions are impure. To love is to will good, to have pure intentions.





Love is the toughest teacher. It makes us a man from an animal. It purifies. Love commands the will to seek not enjoyment but what is good. To will, that another not be left out of a game is choosing a good. Often that would mean playing with a novice and turning a novice yourself, which may not be challenging or enjoyable, just so that he could enjoy the game than shudder away at your mastery and attribute it to the difficulty of the game. Love seeks that he be able to appreciate the game as much as you. A father plays like a child and suppresses his own pursuit of challenges and thrills in order that, one day the child will play like the father. Omnia Vincit Amor