Do We Really Love Them? Creating False Images of Others

*Spoiler alerts to follow for East of Eden and Gone With the Wind.

In his classic Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote that, “Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of feelings but of the will.”¹ Our culture tends not think of love in this way, that is, as a disposition of the will rather than as a state of emotion and feeling. And this is part of the reason why “love” in our culture is often so shallow. If love is as fickle as our emotions toward another, then even at its loftiest, the two it binds together are forever hanging on by the thinnest of threads. When love is thought of, lived out, and expressed as the will acting for the good of another, it is built upon a much surer foundation. 

None of this is to downplay the role and good of emotion in any of the different kinds of human love. However, it is merely to draw attention to the need to think carefully about what it means to love another and to be in love. When love is bound to emotions, it is far more likely to be blind. When love is bound to the will, it not only sees, but can also sustain. Of all the various loves, romantic love (eros, as Lewis would call it), is the most likely to be driven and deceived by emotion. 

Think how often couples express their love for another verbally, when they really know so little about them. If love is being cradled only in the emotions of the individual, this becomes a risky business. Whether or not they truly love that person is hard to know. Time will usually tell, but those who let time alone determine the genuineness of their love are typically setting themselves and others up for a lot of pain and hurt. As we think about two lovers, we must ask, can someone be loved without being known?

Let’s think specifically in the romantic sense to keep the qualifiers to a minimum. If Jack tells Jill he loves her, is that true if Jill is only an idealized and unrealistic image in his mind? If his will is set to do good to Jill, then sure, despite his wild imagination for who she is, he may love her in that sense. But romantic love means more than just doing good to the other, it is not less, but certainly it is more. 

And, even then, one of the most fundamental desires of any human is to be both known and loved. If we fail to know, we fail to love. And there is another fundamental of human nature that we have to deal with that makes this even messier. No matter how much we love our significant others, there is always another who competes for that love no matter how deep or how true our affections are. That other, is our self. The deep self-centeredness within us, is perhaps our greatest barrier toward truly loving another well. 

This concept comes up quite frequently in classical literature. Let’s look at a few examples to flesh out the abstract discussion above. John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is one of my favorites. The readability, the relatability, and the keen insights into human nature are worthy of praise. One such insight relates directly to this topic. It comes up with two different characters. In East of Eden fashion, it is a like-father-like-son scenario. The first situation is when Adam reflects on his ex-wife Cathy who physically shot him and ran away. Adam is talking to a wise character named Samuel, and Adam asks him if his ex was beautiful, their brief dialogue is as follows:

Samuel: “To you she was because you built her. I don’t think you ever saw her—only your own creation.”

Adam: “I wonder who she was—what she was. I was content not to know.”²

Adam realizes that not only did he not know her, but he was content not to. He was satisfied with her being around enough for him to imagine that she was who she wanted him to be. In effect, despite her extreme flaws, Adam nonetheless used her for his own good. In fact, his willingness to live with this imagined image of her was dehumanizing and far from true love. 

Of course, Adam is not the only one. We see the same thing happen with his son, Aaron. In this scene, the reflection is coming from the woman that he supposedly loved. She is talking with the wisest character in the novel, Lee. 

Abra: “Lee, I’m not good enough for him.

Lee: “Now, what do you mean by that?”

Abra: “I’m not being funny. He doesn’t think about me. He’s made someone up, and it’s like he put my skin on her. I’m not like that—not like the made-up one… He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t even want to know me.”³

Again, not just the failure to know, but even the lack of desire to truly know. And here, you can sense the hurt that such an action causes. But it gets worse, we find out who his true mistress is. This time Abra is talking with Aaron’s brother, Cal.

Abra: “I want to ask you something, Cal.”

Cal: “Yes?”

Abra: “What’s the matter with Aaron?”

Cal: “What do you mean?”

Abra: “He just seems to think about himself… Cal, he writes me love letters now—only they aren’t to me.”

Cal: “Then who are they to?”

Abra: “It’s like they were to—himself.”⁴ 

The saddest part about all of this, is just how believable it all is. If you haven’t experienced it, take my word for it, it’s easy to do, but not always easy to see. How quickly a simple daydream about that nice girl I went out with the other day can subtly start to warp her image into whatever my heart desires her to be, rather than reflecting her actual reality and being true to who she really is. We love ourselves; we crave someone beyond ourselves to love us, and we are all too willing to use another strictly for the purposes of believing we have found that someone. Love isn’t always blind, often it is thoughtlessly ruthless to those whom it professes to care for. 

And it is not just Steinbeck who has captured this idea so well. Near the end of Gone with the Wind the protagonist Scarlet (who is certainly no saint) is reflecting on her love for Ashley. Here is the section, and she is talking to herself:

“But I do love him. I’ve loved him for years. Love can’t change to apathy in a minute.”

But it could change and it had changed.

“He never really existed at all, except in my imagination,” she thought wearily. “I loved something I made up, something that’s just as dead as Melly is. I made a pretty suit of clothes and fell in love with it. And when Ashley came riding along, so handsome, so different, I put that suit on him and made him wear it whether it fitted him or not. And I wouldn’t see what he really was. I kept on loving the pretty clothes—and not him at all.”⁵

Again, using the body and presence of another to form them into something that really doesn’t exist at all. And perhaps all this is why the Gospel is so sweet. Within it is the promise to be both fully known by God and fully loved.⁶ That combination is frightening if we are honest, but also very freeing. And once we have come to accept that reality, then, little by little, God shapes us to do unto others as he has done to us. 

Notes: 

1. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2001), 129 
2. John Steinbeck, East of Eden (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2002), 260
3. Ibid. 493
4. Ibid. 496 
5. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (New York, NY: Scribner, 1936), 1016
6. See: Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), 212-223

Photo by Shaira Dela Peña on Unsplash