'Loves me, Loves Me Not' - 未名交友--(www.jiaoyou8.com)

Lucy: Someday, Charlie Brown, you're going to meet the girl of your dreams.
Charlie Brown: Really ?!
Lucy: Of course, and you're going to ask her to marry you.
Charlie Brown: How nice...
Lucy: Whaddya mean 'nice'? She's going to turn you down and marry someone else. This is very high on my list of 'things you might as well know."

I am smittened by this book 'Loves me, Loves Me Not - the Ethics of
Unrequited Love' by Laura A. Smit. ( no pun intended :)

Part 1 Theology of Romance

Part 2 Interactions with Culture

Part 3 Rejecting, Pursuing and Recovering

I don't think i have ever fallen in love with a real person until my son was born.
I've always been loving myself and my own imagination! But when my son comes along, he changed me so totally. My son is real. I am real. And his father remains as
a real problem for me. But i feel like i can deal with him now without
being terrorized by all non-sensical, non-ethical 'free love' garbages
he and his ex-wife have been choked up by the decadent melting pot of
American culture.

p. 171
If your imaginary contact with a person is better than the reality, then
you are not in love with a person; you are in love with a daydream of your
own creation.
Loving a fantasy is the greatest barrier to loving a real person. Simone
Weil explains that real love 'consents' to the independent freedom of other
people, whereas our imagination often leads us to live in a fantasy world
in which we script and control a person's words and actions. Love is
attentive to another person as purely real who has an independent existence
not oriented to us. Weil writes of the common experience of writing to a
friend and anticipating his reply. "It is impossible that he should not
reply by saying what I have said to myself in his name." Having scripted
the response in advance and imagined a particular answer, we are startled
and disturbed to encoutner the other's independence. We act as though other
people 'owe us what we imagine they will give us." But obviously they do
not owe us anything of the sort. We each have the tendency to believe that
the world is about us, to assume that other people's actions are designed
with us in mind, but only a little reflection shows us that this is not the
case.
It is especially difficult to let go of this "imaginary position as the
center" in instances of romantic love, when we long for our love to be
returned. Imagining what it would be like for the one we love to love us
back is almost irresistible, but doing so ignores the real other person and
replaces him or her with an imaginary person of our own invention. This is
not love, since love means paying attention to the independent reality of
the other person.
In some sense, then, imagination is the opposite of love. Imagination
is associated with possession, whereas love is associated with distance.
Imagination is associated with illusion, love with reality.

Love needs reality. What is more terrible than the discovery that
through a bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary being. It is
much more terrible than death, for death does not prevent the beloved from
having lived.
That is the punishment for having fed love on imagination.

Most of us have probably had the experience of being disillusioned
after an infatuation, of realizing that the person with whom we thought we
were in love was merely the product of our imagination and that the real
person is a disappointment. Most of us have probably not identified our
fantasies in such instances as criminal, but that is how Weil defines them.
She claims that such imaginings are an offense against reality and that
they poison us for real love, which she elsewehre defines as "belief in the
existence of other human beings as such."

When you live in your imagination, you must live alone. No one else can
join you there. If the person you love is only a product of your
imagination, that unreal person can never love you back and your love will
be forever unrequited. Even God cannot reach you in a world constructed out
of your imagination, for God is completely real. The only place a creature
can hide from God is someplace that is not real. In his fantasy The Great
Divorce, C.S.Lewis theorizes that ultimately this is what hell is - an
almost entirely imaginery place constructed out of the sterile and twisted
imaginings of its inhabitants. Only the imaginary can be truly separated
from God, and when we prefer the imaginary to the real, we prefer our own
creation to God's creation. We make ourselves divine.

Let me be clear. Imagination is a good gift from God. We need
imagination to dream of things that are not yet real and to bring them to
fruition. Imagination is required to create, to teach, to explore, to
build. But like all God's good gifts, imagination can be twisted. Because
it is a powerful gift, it is powerfully dangerous when used incorrectly.

Our experiences of romantic love are intimately connected with our
imagination, both for good and for bad. Most of us have had the experience
of meeting a new person and wondering whether this person, still unknown,
may be our future spouse. This wondering is an act of the imagination, and
in moderation it is a good thing. The imagination is the only faculty we
have for thinking about things that are not yet real but that may become
real some day. Without such imaginative wondering, we cannot change our
lives or move into a new way of living. Imagination is the necessary
precursor to change. Imagination is also the way in which we check out our
feelings and responses. Perhaps you have met someone interesting and
attractive, but you find that you cannot imagine a life with this person.
In our imagination, we paly out possibilities and discover what we really
want and what we really hope for.

On the other hand, we indulge our imagination in destructive ways when
we turn ohter people into characters in our own inner drama. Most of us
have probably doen this at some point in our life. When imagination stops
being a tool for wondering about real life and becomes instead an escape
from real life, it is being used inappropriately. Some people construct
elaborate imaginary worlds into which they escape each day, and often these
worlds are populated by people who follows a script.
...
[ How can we tell Christianity and Church doctrines aren't elaborate
imaginary worlds into which believers escape world's plight each day by
following scriptures in the BIBLE?...]

There appears to be a conflict between two truths here. On the one hand, we
all know the truth of the saying "Love is blind." People in love are often
blind to the real nature of those with whom they are in love. On the other
hand, there is another old saying, traceable to the twelfth-century monk
Richard of St. Victor:"Only love sees" Irving Singer refers to such
bestowal love, the love that sees the value and the glory of another
person. It is a "valuative gesture" made by the imagination in which even
the foibles of the one we love become somehow dear to us.

The lover's glance fixes upon the sheer presence of the beloved. In
that extreme condition sometimes called "falling in love," such
attentiveness often approaches self-hypnosis...The lover's glance
illuminates the beloved. He celebrates her as a living reality to which he
attends. As in celebration of any sort, his response contributes something
new and expressive. He introduces the woman into the world of his own
imagination - as if, through some enchantment, she were indeed his work of
art and only he could contemplate her infinite detail. As long as they
intensify her presence, the lover will cherish even those features in the
beloved that appraisal scorns. Does the lady have a facial blemish? To her
lover it may be more fascinating than her baby blue eyes: it makes her
stand out more distinctly in his memory. Does she have a sharp tongue and a
biting temper? her love may come to relish these traits, not generally but
in this particular woman. They make the image of her vivid and
compelling...They show him with unmistakable clarity what she is.

Singer goes so far as to define love as "a subspecies of imagination."
Singer appears to believe that the lover's positive vision of the beloved
is to some extent the lover's creation. I would argue that if the vision is
generated by the lover, then this is a case of infatuation, not love. But
if the vision is a result of lover paying close attention to the reality of
the other person in order to see and draw forth the wonder and the glory
that God has placed there, then such love reflects God's love for us. God
creates the goodness of the particular person, which love then enables the
lover to see.

This is the sort of love that is celebrated in the Song of Solomon. The
bride says of herself, "I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys"
(2:1), describing herself in terms of common flowers that grow in abundance
in the land of Israel. She sees herslef as commonplace, indistinguishable
from any other young woman. But her bridegroom replies, "As a lyly among
brambles, so is my love among maidens." (2:2). She is the one woman to whom
he is giving all his loving attention, and so she stands out for him as
unique and marvelous. His love does not create her beauty; rather, his love
draws out the beauty that is already there.
...
People, however, are a mixture of actuality and potentiality, being and
becoming. Some of what God has designed us to be is already actual, but
most is not. Since our essential nature is not fully actualized, we have
not yet come into our own. To see another person's full beauty requires
seeing not only what is actual but also what is potential - what that
person may become. Seeing such potential requires imagination, since it
cannot be directly experienced as actual or real. An example of such vision
is the way parent loo at their children...

Clearly, there is a danger of imagining something illusory rather than a
potential reality. Consider, for instance, parents who imagine their own
frustrated aspirations fulfilled in their children. Such children may wish
their parents had less imagination. The key seems to be the combination of
imagination and love. Williams would agree that love celebrates another's
independence. Therefore, loving imagination never seeks to use a person as
an extension of ourselves but rather sees the potential of the other's
essence realized. This ability to imagine the beauty that is coming as well
as the beauty that is present is activated by love and made possible by
imagination. Love lets us see one another as we may someday be. Love gives
us insight into the divine spark in another. A loving vision sees
potentiality fully actualized.

ps For those members who pride themselves with dead ears to foreign tongues, i apologize for my marathon quotation out of nobody's love affair. At least, I choose this club for my preaching after some serious reality check-ups.

※ 最后修改者：nunia, 修改于：2006-03-27 18:07:00 ※
※ 来源：Unknown Friends - 未名交友 http://us.jiaoyou8.com ※