Deconstruction of Love

Dimitri Kvintradze
Deconstruction of Love
Every day we hear word „love‟. Our friends, family, relatives or just people around us tend to use this
word quite often to express some warm or close feeling towards another person. Beside the fact that the love
is feeling, it is totally a cultural event. In this composition, I will try to discuss love, deconstruct it and
express myself on the matter.
Before moving towards any serious matter, let‟s try at least to define what love is. Many scientists
agree that love is an emotional state involving attraction, sexual desire, and concern about the other person
which represents the most positive level of attraction. Moreover some scholars and scientists assume the
distinction between 6 types of love:
1. Passionate love
2. Game-playing love
3. Friendship love
4. Logical love
5. Possessive love
6. Selfless love
In this essay, I will mostly emphasize on the first type written above which is passionate love.
Therefore, passionate love – refers to an intense, sometimes overwhelming emotional state in which a
person thinks about a lover constantly, wants to spend as much time as possible with that individual, and is
often quite unrealistic in his or her judgments about that
person. There are 3 conditions which are necessary for
passionate love to occur (See fig 1.1):
1. One must be raised in a culture that
believes in the concept and teaches it to
young people in fiction and in real life
depictions
2. The presence of an appropriate love object
3. The third condition is probably crucial to
intense infatuation. Any emotional arousal
can be interpreted as love
Above we quite precisely define the passionate love
which more or less brought us to the awareness of it. But
here completely contradictory and complicated question
arises: What is the underlying meaning of Love?
(Passionate love in this case). Do people want to express
something else by showing off their love?
As we can see on fig 1.1, there‟s a need of cultural
background in which person has learned about love.
Fig 1.1
Thus, it can be inferred that culture determines and conditions love attitudes of a person. Moreover we can
call it „socializer of love‟. So if we judge the circumstance according to the fig 1.1 there is no love without a
cultural background. This provides the clear view that love – is definitely a cultural event, and as long as we
know it, each cultural event or action has its underlying meaning, which I will try to find out in the
following part.
While trying to deconstruct love, firstly it is essential to find the difference between two
phenomenons:
a) A human world with love (our conscious and contemporary world)

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b) A human world without love (non-existing, imaginable world)
In the first case, there‟s nothing much to say and discuss, because it‟s a contemporary world that
surrounds us every day, where we attach a huge importance and prevalence to love. People believe that if
this feeling is achieved, life flows fully in harmony. So everyone seeks love and tries to enrich their self
with it.
The second case is hard to imagine, but still let‟s give it a shot. If there‟s a belief that harmony
emerges from love (not only from it for sure) then, there will be a lack of harmony in a world without it.
Therefore, harmony and love are indivisible. It balances the life, and the absence of it will lead to disorder
and disbalance. So, here is the moment of truth. The first underlying meaning of love,- Unconscious
balancing of life. If we suggest love according to Kantian philosophy, we can suggest that love is a
noumenon – a-thing-in-itself, which is beyond our
perception, thus it is something unconscious that acts
Love
Life
Balance
in
unperceived
areas.
To enhance reader‟s
(noumenon)
interpretation of what I‟ve said above, I will define
Filter
noumenon: A thing as it is in itself, not perceived or
interpreted, incapable of being known, but only
Fig 1.2
inferred from the nature of experience. Love is a necessary agent of balancing in life, where human beings
have unconscious, vital need to have it. (See fig 1.2)
It was clear with a balance-of-life approach. Now let‟s try to move deeper. Once a friend of mine said:
“Love has no definition or meaning. It doesn‟t have any innate nature. It‟s a humans invented system, which
is hidden under the cover of feelings and represents and stands for the test of ourselves.” Let‟s try to
analyze this saying and infer some assumptions.
In life people often tend to say: I don‟t know how far I can go with this relationship; Can I be with
her/him?; Can I make him/her pay attention on me? I‟ve surfed the net, asked some people and drove very
impressive assumption based on research. Some large percentage of people tends to fall in love because they
are curious about their abilities of getting on with other person and testing their selves in relationship and in
social life with others (in other words to test their traits or knowledge which they have learned during their
living period, based on cultural, family and peer group conditioning). For the first time, when people seek
such relations (love), his/her motivation and willingness is high. After they reach their goal, either they
continue it or they break it. In both cases motivation and willingness decreases. So people unconsciously
create an exam for themselves to test
Human nature
the skills, abilities and knowledge,
and the exam is passed when the
desirable love object is achieved
Love (exam of
Achieving a desirable
Acquiring
(See fig 1.3). For sure the process is
knowledge and
Love object (end of
knowledge
exam)
connected with mutual feeling and
abilities
we often entitle it as love, but we
Fig 1.3
must not forget that the feeling itself
is also a part of cultural conditioning. Thus we can suppose another underlying meaning of love,- A test for
skills, overcoming psychological pressure and enhancing self-confidence, based on feeling.
On the whole, it is clear that in reality love is quite complicated cultural event. We must not forget that
I only discussed passionate love, although there are other many types of love. Still I was able to go deep into
it, find some underlying elements and acquire comprehension about it. The deconstruction of love can be
everlasting and needs more time. The point is that love is not undeconstructable but it needs much more
effort.

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