- 14
- Feb.
- 2024
One can easily picture, on Valentine’s Day, two beings glued to each other, gazing into each other’s eyes, drowning in their oceanic depths, madly in love (because yes, love is madness!), their hands delicately brushing, sitting on a public bench as Brassens sings, or as Peynet draws, alone in the world, despite the critical or envious looks of passersby. This picture-postcard image still makes one dream of a present/absent love…
Whether one is for or against it, Valentine’s Day is above all an occasion to question the unique, subjective meaning that everyone gives to love. In some Lebanese circles, this holiday sometimes gives rise to confusions that speak volumes about the unconscious urges that push some to celebrate their mother, their father or their children…
One can even question the sincerity of declarations of love (accompanied by red roses or other gifts). How many do it out of obligation, to respect a social norm with consumerist underpinnings, in order to avoid possible reproaches? Or out of a sense of guilt, in order to repair certain “errors” or instances of neglect that are sources of tension? And the other person, not fooled, simply accepts the offering so as not to create turbulent ripples…
Sincere love that binds two beings does not wait for February 14 to declare itself. Genuine love is celebrated every day by renewing itself, by resolving conflicts without avoiding them, so as to strengthen the bond, by telling the other person words that make them feel and understand how happy one is by their presence at one’s side.
Alas, love is anything but straightforward, it is far from being as pure as one would like to believe, far from innocent. On the contrary, it causes turmoil and upheaval (and that is putting it mildly!), and questioning. In reality, love is the object of a major misunderstanding: that of expecting something from the other person that one will never receive.
Let us recall the definition given by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whom we have discussed at length in other articles, “Love is giving what one does not have to someone who does not want it.” In other words, to love is, unconsciously, to be driven by the nostalgia of recovering the part of oneself that was lost in archaic times. To love then amounts to begging the other person for this missing part, like a beggar claiming crumbs to break their deprivation. Sometimes, for an instant, just for an instant, one will have the illusion of obtaining it, but that will be enough to cling to it for a long time.
Let us question J. Lacan further, who tells us, “There is no sexual relationship,” as if to drive the nail in even deeper! And he is quite right! He is telling us, once again, that what brings two subjects together is the unconscious fantasies of each! Even in the sexual act during which familiar persons collide, each one is led elsewhere by their unconscious. This encounter, however, powerfully experienced, is not one at all. The two partners find themselves, yet again, in a fundamental difference stemming from the utterly unique desire of each: their two desires will never meet. Hence a permanent feeling of frustration leading to reproaches addressed to the other person for not understanding, not satisfying, not knowing how to love, etc. It is very comforting to convince oneself of the complementarity of two partners. Again, everything is just fantasized desire, always distant, inaccessible. The love relationship only exists in uncertainty and wandering. Quite mad is the one who is persuaded of its perfection or even completeness, its adequacy. An unbridgeable abyss separates the desires of one and the other.
But on the occasion of the feast of love, I would not want to be a killjoy and end this article with the frustrating statement that love does not exist! On the contrary, love exists. It was there when two gazes penetrated each other. That was the moment of all ecstasies (“There, all is only order and beauty, luxury, calm and voluptuousness,” says the poet), the moment when fantasies were satisfied, of fullness, of total happiness. Alas, it was so ephemeral: it only lasted three or four months. Then it faded away. And ever since, one keeps searching for it again. At one point, one thinks one has found the one whom one would like to adore, “whom one was searching for in the rain, whom one guessed in a fleeting glance, between words, between lines and beneath the makeup of an oath made up to spend the night” (Léo Ferré), it hurts, one gets up with bruises, and heads off again towards the quest for the lost object, an endless quest.
Beware: do not stop on any account, for this moment of pure blissful ecstasy is the one that will convince you that yes, love exists, I encountered it for a moment, a short moment that is worth continuing to persevere. This short space of time will console you in advance for the inevitable disillusions to come, and will spur you on to desperately seek the key to the front door leading to intimate reunions.
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