They Are Also Sayd to Love

I don't really believe in love at first sight.

As I said on here before, the word love can actually be a bit unspecific. So, to clarify, it is possible to care about somebody the first time you see them. It is even possible to care deeply about someone early on.

But when it comes to being actually in love with somebody, it takes more time. In Win a Date With Tad Hamilton, after Tad tells Rosie that he loves her, she says, "You maybe wanna love me, but I think what you love right now is the idea of me. You can't love someone for what they stand for or what they seem to be. You have to love them for their details; for the little things that are true for them and only them." And I'm not sure how exactly I share that feeling, but I do know that for certain types of love, including what I tend to think of in association with the phrase "love at first sight", you need to know somebody well.

This past spring, I was really bothered by how often in literature characters are depicted as being 'in love' with someone they barely know. The offender I remember most clearly is The Three Musketeers, probably because of a combination of it being what I was reading when I got really irritated and because it is particularly bad in this regard. As I remember it, d'Artagnan, the protagonist, falls in love with two different women he knows absolutely nothing about. The first woman he finds out is really bad news, and he falls out of love with her fairly quickly - more quickly than I think would be possible for anything I would consider more than a crush. If it had come out that he had just thought himself to be in love, that would be one thing. But no, it is referred to as though he really had been in love and just got over it. I sometimes thought that maybe it was a problem with the translation; that the French had different words that more exactly expressed the nature of the feelings. But I wasn't completely convinced. Partly because I had noticed similar issues in books I read in their original language - English.

Last Wednesday I was reading Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. In Chapter VI, Hobbes defines a number of the terms he will be using throughout the book. About love, he says, "That which men Desire, they are also sayd to LOVE: and to HATE those things, for which they have Aversion. So that Desire, and Love, are the same thing..."

As I read that, I thought that reading 'love' to mean 'desire' would work really well for me in books such as The Three Musketeers.