Love is what love does

Pet dogs can be loved by their owners, and they can love back. They can also mate. If dogs could speak, they would describe an owner’s care as lifelong love, and the mating experience as momentary coitus – two distinct experiences. However, when we use the English language for the human experiences of faithful care as well as sex, the same word is often used – ‘love’. In contrast, the Greek root word for the erotic, eros, is different from agape (selfless love), similar to how kaamam is different from sneham in Sanskrit.

Jesus said that at the beginning of creation, God made humans male and female (a clear sperm-ovum binary). He said, “A married man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and the two become one body.” The commitment of sneham precedes the kaamam experience of two bodies becoming one. A household in which mutual care persists is where the children born from such a union can flourish. US professor Melissa Kearney in her book, The Two-Parent Privilege, explains the benefits to entire societies when the national trend is for children to be cared for by their biological parents. Indeed, one could argue that social norms that encouraged commitment as the basis for physical union are the foundation on which India as a knowledge powerhouse has been built.

A standard teaching at Christian weddings is that anyone who believes that the sacrifice of Christ’s life guarantees his or her salvation, finds in Christ’s love, the model for self-sacrificing husband-wife love. Sacrifice means many things, for example, sexual union that prioritises commitment over casual, on-again, off-again consent. Or ‘bearing with one another in love’, as St. Paul taught, that is, not focussing on the other’s faults, including imagined deficiencies such a skin colour! The Maharashtrian Christian poet, Narayan Vaman Tilak, wrote about love that values the other person – the real person – rather than just their outer shell, “Pearls, not oysters, be my part. Thy face I seek not, but thy heart.”

Is a love that is a mere expression of mating-dog instinct really love? A person invests nothing in such a feelings-driven power-grab. On the other hand, committing to give to a relationship, before receiving, is an investment that sustains life, and sustains for life.