Love is the most basic, natural of all feelings. If the world would only give love a chance, return to its natural love state, we could save the world from this mad dash into global disaster.
HUSBAND
During the major blackout in New York City some years ago, people shined flashlights down from their apartments to help those below find their way. At the same time, looters and muggers were on the loose to an extent never before imagined, even in New York. Which is the “natural state,” the aggressive capitalizing on human misfortune or the caring, helping motivation of the apartment dwellers? The answer is that both states are natural.
Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz suggested that aggression is basic to human nature. Anthropologist Ashley Montagu speculated that human cooperation and caring have an evolutionary base. Dr. Reuben Fine describes what he calls “love cultures”: harmonious, sexually open, contented, and happy places where aggression, if present at all, is directed to outside forces and spirits. Freud felt that love and aggression were both characteristic of human nature.
Theorists and researchers have been unable to support the conclusion that any one human characteristic or experience is more natural than any other. To assume that “love will out” is to be unrealistic. The effort must be to maximize our efforts to teach, encourage, and nurture love, not trust in its evolutionary advantage.
“So help me, I could just kiss you,” said the wife. “So kiss me. I’ll help you,” said the husband. Love needs all the help it can get. It will never make it on its own.
“If he doesn’t love me anymore, there’s nothing I can do or he can do about it,” the wife reported. “You either love someone or you don’t. It’s a basically natural feeling, like hunger or sex.”
“At least give me a chance to make it happen again,” replied the husband.
“I don’t see how,” she replied. “You have exploded at me for years, and I have seen nothing but anger in your eyes. There’s no room for love there.”
The wife had taken the either/or orientation to love, that it is natural and that the presence of any other emotion means that the natural love either was never really there or is crowded out by less “unnatural” emotions of anger or distrust. All emotions are human, and the systems orientation to loving I have been describing does not exclude or favor any one aspect of our humanness.
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