i! Weber State College Comment, April1988, PageS5S “ onfm il were young and skinny and blond and obedient and quiet, and I fell in love with I that person. Now you're old and fat and disobedient so what I’m going to do is to freeze you, make you stay the way you were, become what you were at 20.” But you can’t do that. People change. Yet another response is for people to simply deny they are in love and side-step the issue. Love is, after all, just an “imaginary emotion,” they say. Others develop and pursue new “passions” to take the place of love— academics, athletics and the like, or they try to duplicate past courtship patterns either with the same person or with someone else. Carson says none of this will work. Her answer is simply to accept the fact that possession means loss of desire. Recogmize the fact, she says, and don’t berate yourself because you can’t have that kind of romantic love for the rest of your life, unless you want to keep changing partners. I have a different answer. To me it seems that love is the pursuit of knowledge Pursuit: The fire of love by Barbara West eople fall in and out and back in love in our society in what seems to be an ever-quickening cycle. The process itself creates interesting effects, but I’ve always been fascinated by why people fall in love. Amyth discussed in Plato’s Symposium talks about why we desire who we desire or marry the person we marry. It’s atheory developed by Aristophanes. Human beings, he said, were rounded characters when they were first formed. If you look at your back you’re sort of cut in half, a flat person. According to Aristophanes you once had another half, another part to you that fit on your back which faced the other direction. But when people lived like that they became proud and arrogant and decided to attack the gods of Olympus. The gods, in order to cut people down to size, sent down Apollo. Apollo cleaved human beings in half and healed their backs so they would not die, pulling everything together with the navel. Now, according to the myth, there is another half of you somewhere, and you spend your life in pursuit of that half. Pursuit is the key word here, and one of the key phrases Anne Carson talks about in her book, “Eros: The Bittersweet.” You’re pursuing or seeking this other half and you carry within yourself a little idol of that person. When you meet another person you compare the “idol” with him or her and thus you are able to recognize your other half. This pursuit seems to be what we are looking for in love. The question is what happens when it’s obtained? What hap- pens to us once we have what we seek? Do we really live “happily ever after?” Carson says, “No.” When love is fairly in one’s grasp, when we have it, when we’ ve reached it, there-is a loss of eagerness. We no longer feel the same feelings that we did when we were pursuing whatever it was we were pursuing. Love tends to make us feel euphoric. We get caught up in the emotions and are either in love with love or are simply overwhelmed with erotic passion. But when the honeymoon’s over and we start it a person, art piece, an old book or any other quest, the need and desire to pursue it are gone. You must desire something else because by definition the first love is no longer desired. That is the bitter part of eros. You can no longer desire something that you already possess and that creates all sorts of problems. “What is known, obtained, possessed cannot be an object of desire. It is now static because we possess it. It is the desiring that we desire. It is the reaching out. It is this activity of trying to possess or gain,” Carson said. The irony of the situation is that just when you think you’ve obtained your desire you’ve lost it. That’s why people are so caught up in “unrequited love.” We can always go on desiring the one that got away. seeing our companion brush his or her Some interesting character traits emerge when people realize they’ ve captured the teeth, and have to wash their dirty socks loved one and lost their desire. and cook their meals then it all becomes very trite. Carson says that love is, by nature, a Don Juan personalities, for example. These people simply go from one affair bittersweet experience; that try as you might to keep love alive, no matter what you do, you cannot overcome the real experience of love, which is a bittersweet experience. eternal quest to keep desire alive. As soon as one relationship grows stale they simply Once the object of love is obtained, be about another person; not just the having, but the knowing. We want to know this other person. We reach out to physically know them, but we also want to know who they are, what they are all about and how that knowledge can fit in with what we are as well. If we allow the other person to grow and change, and grow and change ourselves as well, does not that add some kind of fresh insight into the relationship? If you are continually allowing the other person to change are you not, in fact, falling in love continually with that person all over again? If you are interested in your life, if you are interested in your work, if you are growing, thinking, reading, studying, and reaching out to another person who is also growing, changing, and learning, then you Stay in pursuit and stay in love. To allow our partners that upward growthcan be frightening, especially if we are concerned our partner may grow away from us.#I agree that growth does change a relationship, but as itchanges it survives. Solidification comes when you’re both static. You no longer have anything to share. You know everything there is to know about one another and no development takes place. a» to another, one marriage to another, in an move on to someone else. Another common coping trait is manifested in the person who attempts to freeze ‘love. The husband will say, “At 20 you Mrs. Westis an instructor in the English department at Weber State, and currently lives in Salt Lake City.