As some of us bask in the romantic after-glow of Valentine’s Day on Sunday—chocolates, jewellery, romantic dates, hotel rooms without our children—others may be left in place of deep despair. The anonymous Valentine’s card that came through the post was not from your irresistible colleague who engages you in flirty conversation at the photocopying machine everyday—it was from your own mother. Happy Valentine’s Day sweetheart – I love you! she beams. Urghhh, motherly love…
Let us support this second category of people, then, and question the very notion of love in today’s Word-of-the-day.
What is love, anyway?
Is it…the version of love that Hollywood and media would have us believe (passion, sex, and copious levels of physical attraction)?
Is it…the feeling of a child who looks at their parent and thinks that they are the Universe?
Is it…the feeling of a parent who watches that child asleep and fears, terribly, the time that they grow up?
Can it…describe the relationship between a human and his pet dog (and can this feeling be reciprocated, or is love only part of the human condition)?
Can it…be possible for a teenager to be in love? (Pah! You’re only 15, what could you possibly know about love?!)
Does it describe…pious devotion towards God?
Perhaps a look at the word’s etymology can help us to define this complicated condition. The word ‘love’ comes from the Old English word lufu. Lufu comes from the Germanic language family, but tracing it right back to its Indo-European source, ‘love’ shares its root with the Sanskrit word lubhyati or ‘desire’. The Latin words libet, ‘it is pleasing’, and libido, ‘desire’, also share this root.
You can describe love in many non-Hollywood terms: companionship, deep affinity or fondness, natural affinity…but there is no taking the desire out of love—it has been there since the beginning.
But let’s consider a Japanese/Chinese take on the word. In your Japanese Valentine’s Day card, you can write anata ga suki . Suki (pronounced ‘Skii’) expresses ‘love’ or ‘like’. It looks like this: 好. There are two parts to this character, so what do these two parts mean individually? Could it be ‘desire’ and ‘lust’? ‘Companionship’ and ‘attraction’?
Depending on your Valentine’s Day experience, you may groan when you hear the answer.
The right side of the character represents a woman (女) and the left side is a child (子). The Chinese believed that the symbol of goodness was a mother and child and so you have a word to express ‘love’.
Whatever your mum sent you on Valentine’s Day, and however embarrassing it was to hear her proclamations of love, perhaps it’s a little motherly love beats all the rest.
