what if i love you more?
Paradoxical as it may seem, love only works through a symmetry that’s asymmetrical.
Recently I overheard my teenage daughter talking to her boyfriend on the phone. I only got her side, but I could imagine what he was saying. It went something like this:
You hang up.
No, you hang up.
I don’t want to be the one that hangs up first. Go on.
Silence.
Why didn’t you hang up?
I guess I still wanted to talk to you.
Me too.
I really love you.
I love you too.
I love you more.
No you don’t.
Yes I do.
As I listened, I tried not to think about the boyfriend’s intentions for my daughter, and wondered instead about what kinds of assumption they were making about the nature of love. Each was claiming to love the other more, as if they couldn’t help it, as if somehow they were going beyond what was normal or sane practice in what Ovid called the Ars Amatoria, the art of love. Neither was apologising exactly, but both were confessing to an overabundant feeling, to a helplessly immoderate or recklessly unguarded sentiment that might prove the strength of their love, for sure, but at the same time exposed a terrible weakness.
So what was the assumption? That it’s better to love someone else the same amount that they love you. That when it comes to love, it’s more fitting if equality prevails. That the essence of romantic love is best expressed as symmetry, as a harmonious balance and flow between two people. It should be like the 17th century poem by John Donne, called ‘The Ecstasy’, where the lovers are ‘each other’s best’, and their eyes reflect light to and fro, in a kind of infinity.
The assumption that romantic love between two people should be symmetrical, even when you are too smitten to manage it, itself contains assumptions, like a Russian doll - assumptions that symmetry represents the divine. It is said that Muslim makers of Persian carpets, for instance, are prohibited from creating symmetrical designs, on the grounds of blasphemy: a perfect design would mock the perfection of God, and speak to an excess of human pride. So some flaw must be designed in, as a token of reverence for God’s own ‘fearful symmetry’.
Now, human love should not or could not rival the perfectness of God, but a perfect balance of love between lovers might echo on earth the perfection that exists in heaven. Where there is symmetry, there is no difference, and if there is no difference, there is no opportunity to draw comparisons, and that reduces the need to bargain or protest or play games: If you loved me more, you wouldn’t do that, etc. It keeps the love ideal, as if suspended above time, immune to alteration or contingency, unsullied by the home economics of emotions. To use Plato’s distinction, ideal love inhabits the world of being rather than becoming, of the eternal rather than the worldly, of what is formed rather than what might still change. That’s what Plato meant by platonic love (and he invented it, after all). It wasn’t so much about celibacy as such as maintaining an ideal. Symmetry helps keep it that way.
But other traditions, even overlapping ones, imply the very opposite. Anyone who has frequented Christian weddings must have heard quoted the words of St. Paul, about the nature of love being selfless. If you love someone, you don’t expect anything in return, which is why people who get married agree to do so for richer, for poorer. They’re not in it for personal gain, far from it: love transcends such worldly considerations, and even to mention them seems bad form. So much for pre-nups.
At first sight, that looks like the same argument as above. It seems just as ideal, just as elevated a state. After all, how do you put a price on love without spoiling it? Think of King Lear getting his own daughters - who themselves would rather be on the phone with their boyfriends - to quantify their love for their father, in return for a share of his estate. His eldest, Goneril, who has an eye on the prize, is smart enough not to fall into the trap. She says she loves him ‘beyond what can be valued’:
Sir, I love you more than word can yield the matter;
Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty;
Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare;
Goneril’s masterful rhetoric does the trick. She might be saying that her love is beyond what can be valued, but it’s a precisely measured bit of language that adds up exactly to the value of the land she’s after, and Lear is vain enough, biddable enough, obtuse, insecure, pompous, and deceived enough, to be satisfied.
The lesson is that love, to remain ideal, ought to be given freely - but this leads to a very different conclusion. To give freely is to ask for nothing back, and that means explicitly giving your love with a view not to symmetry, but asymmetry. For love to be love, it has to be ready to remain unrequited. Even if it is returned, love is not love so long as it expects it. You have to love with no expectations, with the intent that you will always love the other person more than they will love you. All of which makes the notion of symmetry, of a perfect balance between two lovers, suddenly sound like some kind of deal - I’ll give you x amount of love, so long as you give me x back. Is that love? Rather than the expression of a semi-divine sentiment, it seems like a cancelling out.
It follows from this alternative tradition that at the heart of love lies the notion of sacrifice. If love is about giving, the logical outcome is a giving up of oneself. The road of love leads to sacrifice, because the giving, at least in principle, has to be endless. The moment you start to limit what you will give in the name of love, you are effectively beginning to negotiate. I won’t give him any more unless he cleans himself up - that sort of thing. You must be prepared to give up yourself, or whatever counts for you as the most precious thing in the world. It’s illustrated best in the story of Abraham being prepared, out of his love for God, to give up his son, Isaac, by sacrificing him. The stakes are pretty high, and love is a risky business. You may never be called upon like Abraham was, but you can’t say that you love someone unless, when the moment comes, you say yes to losing it all. Rather than the scales of love being in perfect balance, there is absolute loss on one side.
So, both traditions agree that love is an ideal, but one says that love must be equal or symmetrical, that neither person should love the other more or less, while the other tradition says that love must be unequal, given selflessly and with the possibility of complete loss, or it looks like trade. Can we reconcile them? We can, but it involves bending the rules of logic.
Think of it like this. Each of the two people in a love relationship is in the same position. It’s not just one of them who has to love selflessly: both of them have to. Otherwise, it’s not a relationship of love so much as one-way adoration, an idealisation rather than an ideal. There need to be two lots of love, one on either side.
So far so good. But if each one is to love the other, and in a way that is as close as possible to the ideal - and remember, there is no love without some notion of the ideal - it means that each has to know two things. First, that the love they give is potentially unrequited and endless, with the prospect of it ending in sacrifice. Second, that the love they get is potentially unrequited and endless too, and just as open to a sacrificial ending.
And that produces a paradox, a warp in logic: love has to be unrequited on both sides. Each is equal in the inequality, in the difference. A symmetrical asymmetry applies. Each person loves without expectation, and mustn’t for a moment wonder if the other’s love is the squaring of some debt, because that would instantly corrupt it, making the whole thing feel like a market. Each gives love to the other person, and each receives it from the other, as something undue, or even undeserved, and therefore as completely unexpected. Every time it is taken, love has to feel like a complete surprise.
It may be illogical, but the truth in love is that each lover has to love the other more than the other loves them. That’s the impasse in the logic of love. But rather than concluding that love is some runt in the family of logic, I would say that we haven’t yet created a logic adequate to the complexity of things like love. It is more a failure of logic than of love, in other words. After all, love is love precisely because it’s not logical. Logical love wouldn’t be love.
One last thought. In the equal inequality of love, it may not be the same love that goes each way. Nobody knows if the love that the other person feels is the same as the love they feel themselves. How could you prove it? No one will ever know. Exchanging love with another person involves an uncertainty, a guessing, a trusting, and an inferring. That sounds bad, but it’s all right, because romantic love is precisely the intimate experience of asymmetry, shared by two people.
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