Liking Vs. Loving

Recently I found  a speech by Jonathan Franzen delivered at  Kenyon College. Franzen won the 2001 National Book Award for his novel “The Corrections”  and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for the same novel. He is also the author of the novels Freedom (2010), Strong Motion (1992), and The Twenty-Seventh City (1988). His nonfiction includes the books The Discomfort Zone (2006) and How to Be Alone (2002), along with contributions to The New Yorker magazine.

I liked this speech so much that I read it again and again.  NY Times published it with the title “ Technology Provides an Alternative to Love.”  But the original title is  “ Liking is for Cowards, Go for what Hurts”.

The speech is very insightful and has gems embedded in almost every line.

He says “ Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to  what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object  and is consigned to a drawer.”

“ To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of  techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes – a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be,effectively, a mere extension of the self.”

He says from mobile phone to facebook, everything is evolving through this path. 

This he is describing as techno-consumerism.

Coming to facebook he says

“We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.”

Realize we do not pay the price of friendship for being in the private hall (which is again public ) of fame of so many persons simultaneously. Nor have they paid as such. This is simply a make believe life. We are seeking self flattering in our own mirror.

Finally consider the following coming from Franzen :

“ My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about ‘getting down in the pit and loving somebody.’ She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard. The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships.

Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person.

Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly  you’re having an actual life.

Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie.

But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every  particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno- consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are.

And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific.

Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being.

Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

 The big risk here, of course, is rejection.

We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an  infinitely big pool of potential likers.

But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have  it rejected, can be catastrophically painful.

The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world  of liking” .

So the choice is yours.