Four Letters or Less

The word Love is a lot like the word God – easily misinterpreted, with sorted and extensive histories, and used excessively when we’re angry, uncertain, infatuated or drunk.

Everyone interprets Love differently, and yet we’ve developed very few systems for determining exactly how it is meant. Now, God has more names than Love, with associated institutions and paradigms. Thus, we abscond the awkward silence by clarifying that we believe in such and such a God associated with such and such a religion, group of people, geographic location, etc. When someone uses the word Love, however, we seem to assume they mean whatever we mean when we say it (not that this isn’t also frequently the case with God, but that’s a different rant).

How could you possibly wrap up in four letters or less what you meant when you said Love? There’s Love that makes you feel like there are bubbles in your veins (the sparkly, happy kind, not the Bends) and everything is going to be OK. There is love that binds you to situations that you would never, under any (other) circumstances remain in for any length of time, or to people who hurt you repeatedly. There is love that makes people crazed, disoriented, sometimes even homicidal. There is Love fabricated by the unattached masses to attempt the inspiration of closeness and, usually, nakedness. There’s Love that makes you feel wanted, alive, like you can speak your mind and act on your impulses without being judged or belittled.

There is love that keeps you quiet, because sometimes it matters more that someone think well of you than that they understand what you’ve been trying to say and who you really are.

Love can be patient and kind, or it can curse you with darkness, locusts and, occasionally, sudden death. God and Love are not so different – we fight wars for both, create enormous bodies of mediocre popular music for both, give one credit for the other and fairly often confuse them with each other entirely.

What I want to know is if each interpretation of God comes with a peer-edited, thoroughly scrutinized and widely available reference text, then where do I get one of those for Love? And are we really meant to blindly stumble, damaging one another and ourselves, being embarrassed and alienated over and over again until we finally either give up, settle, or convince ourselves that we have it all figured out and impose our newly constructed “understanding” of Love on the nearest gullible person with good dental hygiene and a taste for long walks on the beach?

The worst part is that, when you get down to mechanics of continuing the human race, surviving, Hell, even being happy, you don’t need either one. We just want to have something in our pocket so when someone asks what we believe in we can answer in four letters or less.