Unselfish Devotion
It seems that there are multiple different ways that people love each other. One is with unselfish devotion where the lover never tries to hurt or say an unkind word to the other and only tries to make their life better. This could even mean renouncing the one they love if that’s what’s best for them. Diggory Venn, the reddleman in The Return of the Native is an example of this. He tried to help arrange the marriage of the woman he loved to someone else, and was always lurking in the shadows to keep an eye on her and make sure she was okay. An even more extreme example is the nightingale in Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose,” who sacrificed her life by pricking her heart on a thorn to color a rose red for the young man she loved she he could use it to win over the woman he loved.
Jealous and Hateful
Then there’s the jealous and hateful kind that makes the lovers want to hurt each other, sometimes by acting cold or being seen with someone else or trying to hurt the other in retaliation for a slight. In Grahame Greene’s The End of The Affair, the narrator equates his desire with hatred and says, “I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.” The characters in the movie “The War of the Roses” are an extreme example of this.
Tepid Love
Then there’s the tepid kind of love that a couple has to work hard to keep alive and is based more on the necessity or habit of being together for a long time. We probably all know couples like this, who stay together for their children, or simply because they married each other long ago. J. M. Coetzee explores this in his novels with characters who have trouble making real connections with other people.
Self-loathing Love
Then there’s a tormented and self-loathing kind of love where a person may feel unworthy of their lover and may hurt their lover by not having the confidence to give them what they need. For instance, if the couple argues or breaks up, the self-loathing partner may never apologize or tell their lover how much they love them because they are sure that what they did was unforgivable and their partner hates them. It seems this can hurt a relationship as much or more than the jealous and hateful kind. Kafka’s letters to his lovers show this kind of self-loathing and self-doubt,where he would refer to hiself as a worm or a lizard. He warned them that he could not be good for them, and described wanting to torment himself. He liked his impending death by hemorrhage to falling in love.
Subsuming Love
There’s even the kind of love where the lover wants to be subsumed by the other, as in “The Darling” by Chekhov. There’s a famous scene at the dinner table where she inadvertently reveals that she is having an affair with her boarder when she starts repeating opinions of his about topics she knows nothing about because his opinions are now hers.
Healthy (?) Love
Then, of course, there are more healthy kinds of love that may be some mix of the above but that involve two individuals comfortable in themselves and willing to work through the issues in their relationship.
What do you think? Can all of these actually be called love? Did I miss something? How do you experience romantic love?