An Amazing Voyage to the Heart of Love
To dig deeper into the theory of love described in Voyage to the Heart visit Love-AUnifiedTheory.com or gain a brief impression of the book with the excerpts below:
PREFACE - VOYAGE BEGINS
Closing it [C.S Lewis' The Four Loves], I placed it on the table next to me as I gazed across the still swimming pool. My wife, Denise, was chatting with her parents at the deserted pool bar. Fijian afternoons are so damn slow! I picked the slim book up again and read the inside jacket: “Lewis categorizes and describes all the natural loves.” What was promised and what I read were not the same.
Lewis’ answer to love is deeply Christian. When he looks at love, he finds four types: Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity. I cannot see how they apply to an abandoned child or the love of all wives by all husbands, or parents and daughters. In finer detail, he does not address differing types of love from self to things to ideas as I expected from a full theory of love. And, most striking of all, his book does not consider how people can say they love someone, but then act in ways that contradict such a statement. Or how love seems conditional and egoistic at times. Rather than describing love, it explains how to be affectionate, treat friends well, act in a romantic relationship and love charitably, all under God’s gaze. This is neither love nor a categorization of the natural loves.
What I need, I thought in that late Fijian afternoon, is a proper explanation of love: one that reduces it clearly to an essence that all types of love spring from, not a discourse based on religious belief.
I yanked the reins of my wondering mind. Lewis had disappointed, and there must be others like me who wonder what love is and have published their theories. After all, love is essential to life.
Closing it [C.S Lewis' The Four Loves], I placed it on the table next to me as I gazed across the still swimming pool. My wife, Denise, was chatting with her parents at the deserted pool bar. Fijian afternoons are so damn slow! I picked the slim book up again and read the inside jacket: “Lewis categorizes and describes all the natural loves.” What was promised and what I read were not the same.
Lewis’ answer to love is deeply Christian. When he looks at love, he finds four types: Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity. I cannot see how they apply to an abandoned child or the love of all wives by all husbands, or parents and daughters. In finer detail, he does not address differing types of love from self to things to ideas as I expected from a full theory of love. And, most striking of all, his book does not consider how people can say they love someone, but then act in ways that contradict such a statement. Or how love seems conditional and egoistic at times. Rather than describing love, it explains how to be affectionate, treat friends well, act in a romantic relationship and love charitably, all under God’s gaze. This is neither love nor a categorization of the natural loves.
What I need, I thought in that late Fijian afternoon, is a proper explanation of love: one that reduces it clearly to an essence that all types of love spring from, not a discourse based on religious belief.
I yanked the reins of my wondering mind. Lewis had disappointed, and there must be others like me who wonder what love is and have published their theories. After all, love is essential to life.
CHAPTER 1 - WHAT IS LOVE?
What I admire about history’s great thinkers is their courage to question common beliefs within their fields of enquiry. Newton did when he wondered why objects fall to the ground, Galileo when he speculated — in the footsteps of Copernicus — does the Sun really circle the Earth? Newton might have been satisfied when he was told all heavy objects seek the centre of the Earth as God intends. Galileo could have been equally satisfied with the common knowledge of the Earth’s rightful place at the centre of the Universe. That is how most people viewed gravity and the heavens in their day, but were these widely held assumptions satisfactory, they asked. We now know they were not, and their rejection of commonly held beliefs has advanced our knowledge significantly, benefiting us all in ways those men could never have imagined. This raises a question: what is common belief on love and does it match objective truth?
What I admire about history’s great thinkers is their courage to question common beliefs within their fields of enquiry. Newton did when he wondered why objects fall to the ground, Galileo when he speculated — in the footsteps of Copernicus — does the Sun really circle the Earth? Newton might have been satisfied when he was told all heavy objects seek the centre of the Earth as God intends. Galileo could have been equally satisfied with the common knowledge of the Earth’s rightful place at the centre of the Universe. That is how most people viewed gravity and the heavens in their day, but were these widely held assumptions satisfactory, they asked. We now know they were not, and their rejection of commonly held beliefs has advanced our knowledge significantly, benefiting us all in ways those men could never have imagined. This raises a question: what is common belief on love and does it match objective truth?
CHAPTER 2 - LOVE BEYOND FEELINGS
...popular media such as TV, film, song and literature portray the message of love as a feeling. The message has us push aside anything other than feelings when thinking of love, but we should sit up and take note [of Rhianna's song We All Want Love].
When the fireworks of falling in love are over and all you want in life is to be loved, what is it you really want?
To be valued by the one who says they love you; to have them with you, caring for you; to know they are proud to call you theirs to the point of being zealously protective. And why? Because being together is a good experience, not just for you but for them.
...popular media such as TV, film, song and literature portray the message of love as a feeling. The message has us push aside anything other than feelings when thinking of love, but we should sit up and take note [of Rhianna's song We All Want Love].
When the fireworks of falling in love are over and all you want in life is to be loved, what is it you really want?
To be valued by the one who says they love you; to have them with you, caring for you; to know they are proud to call you theirs to the point of being zealously protective. And why? Because being together is a good experience, not just for you but for them.
CHAPTER 3 - LOVE DEFINED
Reading Singer [late-20th-century philosopher], I realized that, based on the lover’s past, present and expected future interaction with the beloved, the lover bestows love upon the beloved out of choice.
For clarity, there are four points critical to understanding love:
So when a devoted husband says he loves his wife, he bestows value by becoming committed and attached to her. What he actually means is ‘I value you greatly because I have a relationship with you; I assure you of my commitment to be with you and look after you wherever and whenever possible; I am passionately proud to call you mine.’ THIS IS LOVE.
Reading Singer [late-20th-century philosopher], I realized that, based on the lover’s past, present and expected future interaction with the beloved, the lover bestows love upon the beloved out of choice.
For clarity, there are four points critical to understanding love:
- Value is created in the beloved through getting to know them
- The lover bestows that value upon the beloved
- The lover commits to the beloved
- The lover becomes attached to the beloved.
So when a devoted husband says he loves his wife, he bestows value by becoming committed and attached to her. What he actually means is ‘I value you greatly because I have a relationship with you; I assure you of my commitment to be with you and look after you wherever and whenever possible; I am passionately proud to call you mine.’ THIS IS LOVE.
CHAPTER 4 - LOVE AS BESTOWAL
Love as a feeling versus love as a bestowal means considering how we use the word in everyday language. When a wife says I love you to her husband, she is invariably saying more than just how she feels: she views him as immensely valuable and will be there for him wherever and whenever to do the kinds of things lovers do for their romantic beloveds, and she seeks to hold on to him zealously. Her words are active insomuch she is showing her ongoing commitment to him. In this sense the word love is a verb.
In contrast, someone might say they love in a less active way. Here the word love expresses their feelings: I love you means I feel like this when I am with you. Love in this context is not showing commitment; instead it is describing in the way an adjective does. The two meanings are distinctly different, yet English is vague in getting this across. I call this vagueness the adjective/verb problem.
For example, in Pretty Woman, as Vivian lies next to Edward after sex, she says she loves him. In saying this, she reflects how she feels there and then, not that she is committing to him in any way or that she likes him in the way a noun would reflect her comment. Really what she is saying is: I feel lovely right now, please don’t make it stop.
Love as a feeling versus love as a bestowal means considering how we use the word in everyday language. When a wife says I love you to her husband, she is invariably saying more than just how she feels: she views him as immensely valuable and will be there for him wherever and whenever to do the kinds of things lovers do for their romantic beloveds, and she seeks to hold on to him zealously. Her words are active insomuch she is showing her ongoing commitment to him. In this sense the word love is a verb.
In contrast, someone might say they love in a less active way. Here the word love expresses their feelings: I love you means I feel like this when I am with you. Love in this context is not showing commitment; instead it is describing in the way an adjective does. The two meanings are distinctly different, yet English is vague in getting this across. I call this vagueness the adjective/verb problem.
For example, in Pretty Woman, as Vivian lies next to Edward after sex, she says she loves him. In saying this, she reflects how she feels there and then, not that she is committing to him in any way or that she likes him in the way a noun would reflect her comment. Really what she is saying is: I feel lovely right now, please don’t make it stop.
CHAPTER 5 - ONE VOYAGE TO THE NEXT
Identifying love marks the end of a long journey — and yet is this really the end? My disappointment 12 years ago in Lewis’ Four Loves was not solely that I disagreed with his explanation of love, but that the four loves he described fell short of my expectations. Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity did not sufficiently reflect the loving relationships around me, nor explain how they operated. It is only by appreciating the relationships throughout one’s life and how love affects and is affected by them that we ever truly understand its depth and breadth.
Thus we leave one voyage of discovery and move on to the next: the categorization and description of all the natural loves.
Identifying love marks the end of a long journey — and yet is this really the end? My disappointment 12 years ago in Lewis’ Four Loves was not solely that I disagreed with his explanation of love, but that the four loves he described fell short of my expectations. Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity did not sufficiently reflect the loving relationships around me, nor explain how they operated. It is only by appreciating the relationships throughout one’s life and how love affects and is affected by them that we ever truly understand its depth and breadth.
Thus we leave one voyage of discovery and move on to the next: the categorization and description of all the natural loves.