English
EspañolDoes your car outlive your romantic relationships? Do you look at people as goods to be consumed? Are you attracted to them because they are useful to you? Are you exhausted when you can no longer take advantage of them? If that is so, you will never be able to love anyone except yourself.
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“A ‘culture of the ephemeral.’ Here I think, for example, of the speed with which people move from one affective relationship to another. They believe, along the lines of social networks, that love can be connected or disconnected at the whim of the consumer, and the relationship quickly “blocked”. I think too of the fears associated with permanent commitment, the obsession with free time, and those relationships that weigh costs and benefits for the sake of remedying loneliness, providing protection, or offering some service. We treat affective relationships the way we treat material objects and the environment: everything is disposable; everyone uses and throws away, takes and breaks, exploits and squeezes to the last drop.” (The Joy of Love, n.39)
Commentary
The difficulty in telling a friend he does not know how to love! Of course, it is easier to tell them they need to be loved and served. But acknowledging they have little or no capability to love, give themselves, and embrace others is too difficult. Some friends have the biggest need and zero capability.
Many people transfer the habits and customs more often seen at markets when buying services, clothes, a kitchen or a car to familial relationships. But true love lives only between people who treat each other as people. And, a person, each one of us, is never a means, a utility, an object of consumption.
To truly love is to affirm the preference for the beloved; a genuine beloved – a person different from the lover – who is concrete and identifiable here and now, whose value is unconditional and definitive because that is the value of each unique, unrepeatable and singular person.
Examine yourself honestly: if you do not have that loved one you prefer even more than yourself, perhaps you love no one but yourself. And, you risk seeing others only as objects of use and consumption for your self-centered satisfaction.
If you truly want to love, be humble and honest. Ask yourself if, as a spouse, father, mother, child, sibling, you are looking at your relatives through a utilitarian and egocentric gaze. If your relationships are inspired by self-centeredness, you are perverting your own family. And if you are a parent, who will teach your children about true love? If you “miseducate” them, do not be surprised when they refuse to marry or fail in their personal relationships.
