From a friend's blog
II: LOVE
Peck defines love as "The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth" (Peck 81). We are simply incapable of loving another unless we love ourselves first. By defining love as a will, he claims that it's a choice rather than a desire. Love, unlike "falling in love," is not effortless.
"Falling in love" is a feeling linked with sexual or erotic experience. Think of who you have fallen in love with in the past. They were probably not a family member or best friend. The ecstatic feeling of falling in love allows us a temporary escape from the loneliness of our individual identities. This means that the harder you fall in love, the lonelier you were before you met the person you're in love with - an unfortunate truth. Falling in love, according to Peck, is a trick that our genes pull on our minds to trap us into marriage. This trick is especially fostered by our culture's illusion of a "happily ever after." But what happens when this honeymoon period is over? Well, then there is the chance for real love to develop.
Ironically, real love is not rooted in the feeling of love. Sometimes we act loving when we don't feel loving. But real love is an extension of oneself. It is permanently rewarding to the lover and the beloved. Love is rooted in the acceptance of the separate individual identities of the persons involved. Love is not dependency, self-sacrifice, or a feeling. Love is discipline, separateness, the work of attention, and a risk (of loss, independence, commitment, and confrontation). More so than anything else, love is a mystery.
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