“Love is a Decision” – A statement with no flesh on the bones

Learning in life thus far seems to more or less come in four years cycles for me. Four years of high school, four years of college, four years of graduate school.  I can associate a major, soul-changing, quest or life experience with each of these four-year cycles.  I feel as though another 4 year cycle is coming to a close.  Looking back the last four years have had a profound impact on how I view the world and the people in it.  What follows is my four year reflection on a statement that comes up occasionally.  The statement is “Love is a decision,” or alternatively “Love is a choice.”

About four and half years ago one uncharacteristically lazy San Diego summer afternoon, as the final months of my graduate schooling were coming to a close I was sitting in my living room and I took a moment to ask God what task was next.  I can be a very focused person and I often would not take the time to look around to see what was happening around me so for me this was a bit of an odd occurrence.  Thinking back on it this was totally out of character for me.  It was not something I had been inspired to do.  I was just inspired to ask what was next.  He immediately whispered an answer to me.  I diligently set to work to make it a reality in every way I knew how.  Admittedly I had very little experience in this particular area, but I generally did not let things like my ignorance or incompetence worry me too much me so I just clumsily moved forward.  Within a matter of months in the course of making this task come to fruition things started falling into place.  I was nervous, and felt very self-conscious and was more than a little bit scared.  Undeterred though I gathered what character I could and moved forward. Then in the course of attempting to realize my task I made a series of very bold moves that turned out to be one of the most memorable mistakes of my life.  Never in my life had I felt I had more acted as myself overcoming all my fears to do what I most thought was right...  I dug really deep, but I failed miserably.  It was a train wreck.  The details of what happened are not important.  All that is important for the current discussion is a reflection a on the statement, “love is a decision.”  This is statement that I had firmly believed with all my heart to this date.  Everything I had ever come across seemed to confirm and validate the idea.  Many people inherently hold the somewhat opposing viewpoint of love being a feeling.  I always kind of thought this was silly.  Sure feelings are associated with it, but love itself is not a feeling.  The idea that you knew who you should “love” based on the feelings they gave you also seemed quite silly to me as well.  I typically “felt” attracted to a wide variety of women for one reason or another.  That didn’t seem to mean anything.  Meeting someone based on feelings/emotions seemed to be similar to making decisions based on lust.  Furthermore, when you are a practicing Catholic (at least for me anyways) it was way more important to find someone who was actually a practicing Catholic and striving for Holiness.  Character in the face of adversity was what I was more interested in.  In my life to date it seemed to be about the most rare thing imaginable.  I had been involved in many Catholic groups throughout my life, but most people picked and choose what they would believe.  Most people rejected Church teaching on difficult things like contraception which I found particularly disheartening.  From my point of view finding someone who was a practicing Catholic who I was at least attracted to was good enough for me.  I did not really concern myself much for what their personality might be like or how they might make me feel.  This did not even register with me.  My reasoning was Love meant work and we would work our differences out.  I also discounted concepts such as the “soul mate.”  That just seemed to scream of emotions.  But now all of a sudden I needed to reconsider my stance.  My mistake made me realize I was missing something important so I set out to find out what it was.  

Shortly thereafter I started studying this problem from a point of view I had never considered before.  The point of view of feelings.  It seemed to me that in general “feelings” were more of a feminine concept so whenever I heard a more feminine talk show on the radio instead of changing the channel I would listen to it and try to understand.  Sometimes I would listen to songs with feminine emotional themes.  I read a number of books from the medical profession which seemed to have more of a “feelings” based approach to work.  I read about the experiences of medical students and residents.  I read books written by teachers and therapists because these seemed to be more feeling/emotion oriented professions.  I read accounts of cancer survivors discussing their experience.  I read books on visual design that discussed how emotions and feelings could be influenced by art.  I made some art myself.  I started reading about research on forgiveness.  I remember in particular coming across something known as the Stanford Forgiveness project.  I even remember going over Gen Patraeus’s counter insurgency field manual and finding a variety of areas where it discussed emotional and feelings based values.  I would occasionally ask female friends to recommend books that resonated with a more feelings based outlook on life.  I also nurtured a number of friendships with people who had a feelings-based approach to life and tried to understand why they thought the way they did.  Throughout all of this I think I slowly started to see why feelings or emotions might be important.  To be honest though it was purely at an intellectual level and in a lot of ways I was confused.  The whole world of feelings/emotions was still very alien to me.  I think I got more comfortable with it, but it was a world I did not fit into and a world I could not contribute to.  I would actively practice trying to be more understanding of people and listening to people.  I think I got better at it, and learned to appreciate emotions on some level.  I would occasionally read Catholic blog posts discussing the statement “Love is a Decision,” and some people would strongly defend the statement for the same reasons I would.  Others would totally dismiss it and say something along the lines of, “that is just something people say… Love is a feeling dear.”  I was hitting a roadblock.  It is pretty much a part of Catholic teaching that love is an act of the will, and thus a decision or choice.  Even the movie that describes the life of the very sweet and emotional St Gianna Molla was named “Love is a choice.”  I had made progress but things were still not clear.

I struggled with this question nearly every day for 3 years.  The mistake I made haunted me and I really wanted insight into what I had missed.  Along the way I was seeing parts of the world and human experiences I would have otherwise never had seen.  I was learning a lot.  It was a bit of an adventure.   Was there something important about feelings and emotion I had totally not accounted for?  Why were emotional responses so important to some people?

One day about a year ago I was faced with a problem that I decided to deal with by learning about personality types.  At the time I primarily focused on Meyers-Briggs type indicator.  As I learned more and more about it so many questions that had bothered me for years began to be answered.  It gave me a boatload of insight into who I was and why I was perceived the way I was by others.  I learned a great deal about the gifts and talents of others as well.  Light was shed on so many problems I had encountered that I would just study and study and study and learn everything I could about it.  I am still learning daily more and more about personality and psychology.  I find it fascinating.  

One important feature I learned about was the thinker-feeler dichotomy.  This was the most relevant to the question of “Love is a decision.”  What I realized was that I think and make decisions in a very logical rational way, but others actually think and make decisions with their emotions.  I had never appreciated this before.  Actually there is a technological equivalent to this.  I am a thinker so I make decisions using a logic engine type approach.  I can lay out all the aspects of my decision and explain to someone else exactly why I made the decision I did.  Alternatively, a feeler is like a neural network.  We do not always have a great amount of insight into why a neural network makes the decisions and classifications it does, but it can be successful at dealing with very complex classification problems.  Rational thinkers like myself though may not be as good at dealing with extremely complex problems because we are limited to our own insight.  Feelers may be less constrained by their own insight.  I could now see the possible advantages and disadvantages of making decisions by thinking and feeling.  Both had validity and were worth appreciating.  Feelers tend to generally be more people-oriented.  I think this is because people are much more complex than the physical systems rational thinkers deal with.  Interestingly enough I also came to the conclusion that most stereotypes about men and women are false.   There are plenty of emotional, people oriented men out there, and a number of rational minded women.  

Slowly I started to see the folly of my stance on “Love is a decision.”  It is not that I was wrong.  It is that I was not seeing the whole picture.  What I realized was that what I thought was “a decision,” was in many cases being masked by my thinking.  I could give rational reason why I might or might not choose to love someone.  Feelers on the other had would use a feelings-based decision process to make the decision.  It was just that thinking looks so much like decisions it is hard to tell the two apart. 

Here is where I think it gets interesting though.  My personality is considered the most emotionless of all personalities in the Jungian MBTI sense.  Despite this I know even we emotionless people want some emotion in our life.  We are just very careful and guarded about who we share it with.  As a result we do not practice using our emotions very much, and are not good at it, especially when it comes to externally expressing them.  Really though in many ways emotions and human interactions are what makes life worth living and interesting.  Feelings are the tool that make love for humans interesting.  The statement “Love is a decision” is a very spiritual statement.  God loves thorugh an act of will, and the angels experience love or a lack of love as well.  They do not have emotions or feelings.  The difference is though that we are humans.  We inherently have a material as well as physical nature, both of which have needs that must be respected.  There may be some people who literally need emotion support and the excitement of butterflies in their stomach to experience love.  Others need a person they can share intelligent conversation with.   Both of these are material needs that humans have.  Some people may need more emotional support than others and others may find more excitement in the intelligent conversation and that is ok.  One thing I realized though, is that emotions are inherently the tool with which we display and implement love to others.  Intelligent conversation falls short here as does a number of other human activities such as giving gifts or performing acts of service.  Being skilled in the art of emotions and feeling definitely has its advantages.  It can smooth out relationships between people, make life generally more enjoyable, and it just feels nice when it goes right.  It is kind of like the decision to love is the skeleton of the body, but the emotions are the flesh.  The skeleton keeps everything upright and together but it is the squishy parts that make the body interesting.  Of course conversely there is the problem of emotions.  For people who are feelers we often say they use emotions inappropriately to make decisions that might be better made using rationality.  It is kind of a case of when your only tool is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail.  But I digress…

I still firmly believe love comes from an act of the will or the heart.  Most of the time I do not thing we are making acts of the will though.  We are kind of operating on autopilot.  It is when we have no good reason to continue, and we really do not “feel good” about loving that we have more certainty we are actually making an act of the will to keep loving.  I think a really good example of this is in the book “Lord of the World,” by Fr Robert Hugh Benson.  He the Catholic faith is mostly obliterated.  Science and psychology have destroyed all reasons to continue having Faith.  People routinely leave the Church including priests, bishops and Cardinals.    Even the Pope has serious doubts and does not have any good reasons to continue, and he certainly does not feel like staying Faithful… but he does it anyway.  That is an act of the will.  In my own life I have seen situations where reason and feeling both suggested we should no longer continue, but we did anyways… and I am glad we did but that is another story.

So for all you feelers out there I would like to extend an olive branch.   Let’s meet in the middle and enjoy both the though and feelings and the decision to love.  We can teach each other.  On a side note I want to mention that as I have learned about personality I can even see how the concept of a “soul mate” even makes sense.  

Well that was a long discussion.  I find it amusing that that the Magnetic Fields paradoxally sang, “The book of love is long and boring…. It’s full of charts and facts and figures, and instructions for dancing”   – I will leave you with some feelings to enjoy :-).