What is your reaction to images of tigers in a manmade habitat?
Is keeping these noble creatures in a cage or enclosure is an equally valid expression of love for these animals?
Epiphany
Can we be misled or duped in our understanding of love in a simplistic if-then proposition. Popular culture and the materialist complex have presented this love proposition to us, but ironically they never warn us that the proposition is a setup for failure.
The notion that we fail to understand love because we can’t afford a romantic Sandals holiday, or because we don’t have the perfect family, or because our bodies are normal size might seem like an obvious conspiracy disguised as a promise. And yet we still regularly chase the formula.
The Folly of Formulas
If conditional if-then formulas for the understanding of love are correct and pure, why do we feel like we’re failing?
Love Really?
Is love some kind of encompassing, preexisting truth, alive and independent of us? Or is it – as culture and the media have led us to believe – only as true as we choose to define it, and only as real as we choose to express it?
Love, Sweet Love
We are inundated, overwhelmed, and irretrievably smitten by thoughts of love. We are made willing and vulnerable to the images, words, and expressions of love in the popular media and the day-to-day culture that surrounds us – movies, television, popular music, advertising, social media, food, sports, clothing, many popular and unpopular causes and so many other things have all become a kind of subliminal programming for the modern culture of love.
Love really sells. Everything from diamonds to diapers to pizzas, to pet food. More than anything, the material world has discovered something in us. It’s either a buried treasure or a ticking time bomb, embedded deep, deep in our personal foundations. Regrettably, it’s an involuntary response, sometimes quietly seductively, sometimes intensely gratifying, and almost always a confirmation of one of our most powerful vulnerabilities. We are motivated by the possibilities and fantasies that are the promised rewards of the search for love.
We are surprised, even shocked sometimes, at the lengths to with which we will go to experience what the modern culture of love promises us.