What's love got to do with it?

Crazy love vs. collaborative love.

Nov 15, 2021

Hey friends, welcome back.

Last week, we dived back into one of my favorite subjects (yay maps!) and considered some of their symbolic implications more precisely. Today, I want to talk about a different metaphor, precisely, a few other metaphors for love laid out by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By.

How we typically talk about love

Lakeoff and Johnson spend time laying out some ways our culture typically thinks about love:

LOVE IS A PHYSICAL FORCE (ELECTROMAGNETIC, GRAVITATONAL, etc.)
I could feel the electricity between us. There were sparks. I was magnetically drawn to her. They are uncontrollably attracted to each other. They gravitated to each other immediately. His whole life revolves around her. The atmosphere around them is always charged. There is incredible energy in their relationship. They lost their momentum.
LOVE IS A PATIENT
This is a sick relationship. They have a strong, healthy marriage. The marriage is dead--it can't be revived. Their marriage is on the mend. We're getting back on our feet. Their relationship is in really good shape. They've got a listless marriage. Their marriage is on its last legs. It's a tired affair.
LOVE IS MADNESS
I'm crazy about her. She drives me out of my mind. He constantly raves about her. He's gone mad over her. I'm just wild about Harry. I'm insane about her.
LOVE IS MAGIC
She cast her spell over me. The magic is gone. I was spellbound. She had me hypnotized. He has me in a trance. I was entranced by him. I'm charmed by her. She is bewitching.
LOVE IS WAR
He is known for his many rapid conquests. She fought for him, but his mistress won out. He fled from her advances. She pursued him relentlessly. He is slowly gaining ground with her. He won her hand in marriage. He overpowered her. She is besieged by suitors. He has to fend them off. He enlisted the aid of her friends. He made an ally of her mother. Theirs is a misalliance if I've ever seen one.1

Reading through that list, many of those phrases are something I’ve said at one point or another. The underlying assumption behind most of those is lack of agency: Love is a thing that happens to us that we may respond to but that we don’t control.

This is certainly consistent with how I thought about love for most of my young life. While I may have said that I believed something different through the wisdom of elders, my background thinking was dominated by these metaphors that I have not taken any time to reflect on.

As a challenge to this notion, Lakeoff and Johnson suggest that we can move from being powerless and simply accepting how cultural metaphors shape our reality to actively working to change our reality by using new metaphors:

Many of our activities (arguing, solving problems, budgeting time, etc.) are metaphorical in nature. The metaphorical concepts that characterize those activities structure our present reality. New metaphors have the power to create a new reality. This can begin to happen when we start to comprehend our experience in terms of a metaphor, and it becomes a deeper reality when we begin to act in terms of it…Much of cultural change arises from the introduction of new metaphorical concepts and the loss of old ones. For example, the Westernization of cultures throughout the world is partly a matter of introducing the TIME IS MONEY metaphor into those cultures.2

A new metaphor for love

Lakeoff and Johnson ultimately suggest a new metaphor for love as an example of how this process can work: love is a collaborative work of art:

Love is work.
Love is active.
Love requires cooperation.
Love requires dedication.
Love requires compromise.
Love requires a discipline.
Love involves shared responsibility.
Love requires patience.
Love requires shared values and goals.
Love demands sacrifice.
Love regularly brings frustration.
Love requires instinctive communication.
Love is an aesthetic experience.
Love is primarily valued for its own sake.
Love involves creativity.
Love requires a shared aesthetic.
Love cannot be achieved by formula.
Love is unique in each instance.
Love is an expression of who you are.
Love creates a reality.
Love reflects how you see the world.
Love requires the greatest honesty.
Love may be transient or permanent.
Love needs funding.
Love yields a shared aesthetic satisfaction from your joint efforts.3

So by changing our metaphor, we change our expectations for what the experience of love can and should be. We move from thinking about love as something that happens to us to something that we are active participants in. We update our mental map for what’s possible in a romantic relationship.

We may chafe at the idea that our experience is dictated to us by the metaphor we use to approach it, but Lakeoff and Johnson suggest this is a misunderstanding of how deep metaphors truly work on us:

The idea that metaphors can create realities goes against most traditional views of metaphor. The reason is that metaphor has traditionally been viewed as a matter of mere language rather than primarily as a means of structuring our conceptual system and the kinds of everyday activities we perform. It is reasonable enough to assume that words alone don't change reality. But changes in our conceptual system do change what is real for us and affect how we perceive the world and act upon those perceptions.4

The authors are getting at the notion that metaphors are more than just words; the words of a metaphor are a delivery mechanism for a concept that takes root in our minds. So we can either deny that metaphors have this power or recognize that changing the way we think can be a tool:

Each culture must provide a more or less successful way of dealing with its environment, both adapting to it and changing it. Moreover, each culture must define a social reality within which people have roles that make sense to them and in terms of which they can function socially. Not surprisingly, the social reality defined by a culture affects its conception of physical reality. What is real for an individual as a member of a culture is a product both of his social reality and of the way in which that shapes his experience of the physical world. Since much of our social reality is understood in metaphorical terms, and since our conception of the physical world is partly metaphorical, metaphor plays a very significant role in determining what is real for us.5

As we’ve talked about before, much in the same way the physical reality dictates the type of interactions we can have, our choices about the metaphors we use also shape us back. We can either blindly accept the metaphors our culture hands us or become active participants in choosing how we want to make sense of the world.

So as we go from here today, some thoughts for reflection:

What metaphors for our realities have we blindly accepted to be true without examination?
What are the ramifications of those metaphors in how we choose to interact with the world?
What new metaphors might we consider that could be more helpful in how we approach the world?

And with that, thanks for reading. See you again soon.

As a programming note, we are skipping next week for Thanksgiving, so I’ll be back in your inboxes on 11/29.

Notes and Further Reading

This TEDTalk was a good overview of the implications of changing our metaphor about love.

If you want to check out this work without buying, I did find what appears to be a full PDF here. The pagination may vary from my page number citations noted below.
I previously wrote a post by this book’s title. You can read that post there, and I think there’s a lot of very relevant thoughts to what we’ve just discussed, but I ironically didn’t speak to the contents of this book very much: