Valentine's Day is still a week away, but how many opinion pieces on "consumerism" and "relationships" and the fact that "everyone knows Valentine's Day is a farce but I have to participate in it anyway because, what the hell, I'm in a relationship and it's something nice to do," can you read in a week? Well, apparently, at least one. I figured I'd jump the gun and get a little philosophical up in here to boot. I'm looking out for you. I'm doing the best I can for you. It's like you and me are in a free-form relationship right now. Let's get down to business.
"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is a collection of short stories by the fiction author Raymond Carver, who you may have heard of if you ever took a high school creative writing or English course. That's where I was first introduced to him and this collection in particular, although Carver may have been a little too nuanced for wee, little me as a wee, little ninth grader. Then again, forget that because I actually never grasped the implications of the title until one of my professors last semester- and rather as an offhand comment, too- explained it by saying, "In other words, everything else." That was it. He dropped this bomb on my head, moved on entirely, and unwittingly left me to stew in my own incredulity.
Now, it isn't hard to guess that we talk about love in terms of context. Of course we talk about everything else other than love itself; it doesn't really mean much on its own. Not without a frame of reference, an explanation, a note of clarification. How many modifiers have we attached to the word in order to laden it with specifics? Puppy love, skinny love, motherly love, in love, platonic love... the list very well could go on ad infinitum, couldn't it? The modifiers would get more and more bizarre- they'd probably just start turning into elaborate metaphors- but the language would function.
Love is one of the most abstract concepts in the human world and I never noticed. Raymond Carver said, "What we talk about," and plied me with particulars, with stories and fleshed out people, and I answered, "Exactly," without a second thought. "We talk about people."
This Valentine's Day, do me a favor. Do this favor for me for as long as you've got this abstract human nonsense of an emotion pumping through your heart. We are in a free-form relationship after all. I want you to remember that love doesn't exist in this world unless we create it and we live by it. Please love with a purpose, and mean it. Because otherwise, it doesn't mean a "single" thing.
