Love conquers all

An eclectic group of individuals sit at a table at the Greek Club in Cairo. As the light alcohol loosens their tongues, they throw around frivolity and profundity with equal ease and in a manner typical of francophones – with a dry twist of sarcasm. Jean-Eric, face tanned but tired, with cigarette in one hand and a glass of beer in the other, darts his eyes across the table and is unafraid to express his surprising and surprisingly well thought-out opinions. Staring directly at me he asks – Why is it, do you think, that love is always painful?

In my slight disorientation at the depth of the question I managed a logical though basic answer – love is painful because, even if it were requited, the lover constantly desires to express it and constantly needs the beloved to reciprocate. The mere impossibility or impracticability of such a constant display entails a constant internal struggle.

‘No,’ Jean-Eric bluntly disagrees as he lights up another cigarette. ‘Love,’ he says, ‘is painful because of the gap between who you are and who you have learned to be. Our experiences in life have formed our opinions, our behaviour and motivation. We have learned to be a certain kind person because of our experiences, and we always strive towards ideals such as intelligence, worldliness, success. True love cuts right through all this, leaving the raw human inside of us exposed – it is a manifestation of who you really are and can even ignore (or contradict) the logic or rationale that the person you have learned to be dictates.

‘Love is painful not only because it is difficult to deal with this exposure, but because it becomes more difficult to reconcile your true fundamental nature with your learned behaviour. Your relationship with your beloved becomes almost a parallel existence, but as you begin to experience the world together your relationship must be integrated with ‘reality’ so to speak.’ This challenge, I thought, is both internal and external. First, you must ensure that your fundamental self has made a choice that your experienced self supports by way of conviction. Then, if such internal reconciliation takes place, the second step is to ensure that physical, social reality is also reconcilable. Long-distances, significant age differences, different cultural backgrounds or social convictions – these are all external factors that may affect the difficulty of the challenge.

As one stands at a fork in the road of a relationship that has spanned years, the tendency is to look back and try to see why this diverging path ahead was inevitable from the start- or was it ever? The rhetoric is: love conquers all. Jean-Eric’s lesson, I think, does not deny this. It does, however, suggest that if love were to develop into a fulfilling relationship, other factors (both internal and external) must be considered and that in seeking to bring a loving relationship into the swing of every-day life the emotional toll is inevitable.