Hannah Arendt & the Complexities of Loving

Jack Pemment considers the strange attraction between two deep minds.

- Jack Pemment

The difficulty in explaining one's love for another person in the 'in love' sense is rivaled only by trying to write about it. I think there is a strange infinity to such love, involving endlessly falling, a complete surrender of the self, where even language seems to become superfluous, giving the poets an uphill struggle to produce something credible. But who needs language when you have the complete understanding and empathy of another? Yet these moments of 'infinity' are anything but infinite. And when love goes, it happens quick, it happens hard, and it seems to abscond with a large part of ourselves. Loving others, loving oneself, even loving symbols and ideology, are enough to keep people tingling with purpose and buzzing with meaning. So we can see that, whatever love is, it has to be the strongest motivator, the most authoritative enabler, and the commonest of common denominators for all human behavior. With love, we would die to protect it. Without love, we would die to find it. Love is riddled with these paradoxes.

I've deliberately framed love in this way because I think this recognition of its paradoxical nature is integral to understanding relationships that are often perplexing to those on the outside. We have all come across couples that have left us wondering how they could possibly still be together. What is the elusive factor that makes these people put up with each other, even as they seem to delight in tearing each other apart?