On the nature of love, life, and partnerships

The objective of this post is to establish a connection between love, life, and partnership. No doubt, they are trivial topics to discuss but sometimes, beautiful concepts and ideas emerge out of simple things. I will begin by stating three conceptually (and seemingly) disjoint statements:

S1: The factual knowledge of world is acquired by treating subject (observer) and object (the thing which is experienced) separately.

S2: Life, for past many centuries, has been designed by society to present you a series of challenges and questions unless your volition (free will) decides to work through them.

S3: Partnerships (such as marriage/team-work) is a social institution theorised to combine strengths of individuals. 

These 3 statements will interweave together as I expound each of them separately but connect their corollaries. So let's start!

S1 highlights the notion of a subject-object framework: a tool to understand things in the world. If you are talking about excavating facts about the material things (objects) in the world, you need two things- a conscious brain and the object under investigation. Both of them need to be fairly disconnected from each other to enable unbiased experiment. However, what if you want to understand a mental object in the world i.e. a human, an animal or a living being? It would be wise in this case to replace the word "understand" with the word "feel". The subject-object framework is not of any practical use while attempting to "feel" an object. This is because of the fact that the object (a living being) can not be tweaked as per your wish to realise the nature of "feelings" you are experiencing due to it. Love, for example, is an emotion that you feel when you are mesmerized and happy with the very existence of that object (which can be living or non-living). If it is living, you will fail to justify (or even acknowledge) your feelings to it. In an attempt to do so, you will have to talk to the person. In that process, you will convert your feelings to words- you convey it to object, you get a response (a completely non-determinstic process). The filling of gap between what you feel and what you convey is an unsurmountable task. Things become much easier if object is completely taken out of the equation. It would be then fair to say that love concerns with the subject only.  Let's paraphrase this idea as: "I feel but I don't feel it", that is to say that you are definitely sure about the feeling emotion but the least you are sure about is feeling the object itself. Going by this regard, pop-culture notions like, "I love you", "I feel you" etc. are fairly wrong. Now, what if the object you are feeling is a non-living one (musical instrument, rivers, scenic beauties, places you like visiting)? In this case, it's relatively easy to experiment on the nature of object and explain your feeling (in vague terms) in a metaphorical form. If you are a scientist, you can draw neuro-biological corelations between how different forms of same object make you feel different. So feeling a non-living object is much simpler to explain than a living object. Hence, subject-object framework can be used in this case provided that you are determined to experiment with the object and understand the "feel" associated with it. However, it is again a correlational phenomena, that is to say that you like oranges from set A more than set B maybe because they are juicier (taste) or look good (visual) or some other material reason. However, describing the "feel" of eating set A without comparing it with set B is a futile task. Thus, it would be better to call the non-living framework as the "relative subject-object framework". If in certain situation, the person is: not willing to experiment with the reality of object; if the object is inaccessible; if it is available in one unique form, then the notion of "relative subject-object framework" doesn't apply and all you are left with is the subject itself i.e. you. Going by this regard, if "it" is singular/inaccessible/unique, then phrases "I love it" and "I feel it" are wrong and should be replaced by "I love" and "I feel".

Following arguments from the discussion above, S1 can be written in a more general form:

S1.1: "If you are dealing with non-living things in the world which are unique, singular or inaccessible or if you are dealing with living things in the world, then all you can do in regards to loving/feeling them is to love/feel but remain completely unsure about the nature of reality of them".

S2 suggests the argument that the living in the world is not an easy task. A realistic point-of-view is that every person go through rigorous challenges and difficulties, beginning from the day when they are born. To constanty fight diseases, to not become devoid of loved ones around you, to overcome challenges in career, to remain physically and mentally healthy are simple challenges that life offers.  Overlooking any of them might get you to a worse situation than where you are right now. I am not trying to induce the selection bias here by pin-pointing the negative sides of life. I understand that the life offers beautiful rivers, mountains, animals, mysteries of nature etc. which are positive attributes. One can argue that there are two ways to look at these concerns about life: pessmistic or optimistic. If you choose the former one, you have to constantly use volition to find optimistic points in life. If you choose the latter one, you have to constantly use volition to avoid the pessmistic points in life. But you can also acknowedge the optimistic points and don't think about pessimistic points at certain times of your life. In both cases, life is presenting you with challenges and problems and all you have is volition to avoid them. It can be argued from the perspective of S1 that you need to follow subject-object framework to understand the problems you are facing. Then you can work (understand) to avoid these issues using your rational will. However, sometimes you might try to just sit back and relax and focus on the positive points of life (e.g. in religious prayers). Usually, these positive points stem from the gifts given to us from the nature. These gifts can be both living and non-living being. Invoking argument from S1.1, one can say that an optimistic point-of-view would be to love/feel (these entities) and remain completely unsure about nature of reality of them.

S2 can be written in a more general form as:

S2.1: "Life is an experience every living being go through- it offers many daunting challenges and positive attributes. You have to use volition to deal with former and you can, sometimes, acknowledge (the latter) without dealing with its positive attributes". 

S3 statement introduces the institution of partnership as a way to unite individuals so that their strength (combined volition) increases. The reason behind this social construction is to conquer the daunting challenges offered by the life (S2.1). However, since the unit is composed of human beings, processes like "understanding", "feeling" will start operating when personal relations between partners are turned on. We can apply S1.1 here by arguing that each person in the unit can only love/feel the emotion involved in the relation by not dealing with the nature of the other person. In such a unit, the notion of feeling is valid only if the object is a non-living thing (singular, unique, inaccessible). Because for living being, you only have the "subject framework" which will not lead to any outcome. Hence, in a partnership, focusing on material pursuits of life- completing the team goals, money, job, recognition and so on, should be the priority. Society is designed, as argued in explanation of S2 above, to make individuals follow such material pursuits which is possible using "subject-object framework". In that process, one is highly likely to feel dejected, lost, unmotivated at times (excluding the rare cases of people with tremendous volition). A unit of like-minded people together, in form of marriage-partner, friends, co-workers, help people to stay strong throughout. In the case whenever one has to deal with emotions, then no living being on the planet other than yourself should be involved/concerned with the feeling. That is to say that others should completely stay out of the equation (S1.1). 

Now the next question is: what to do with your emotions if not reveal it to a living being? Arguing from S1.1 and S2.1, there is an ingenious way of dealing with emotions involved in enjoying the positive attributes of Earth by choosing a non-living being which is single, inaccessible, and unique. Arguably, God is an alluring idea in this regard to ascribe your emotion onto. This is because an idea/concept is an abstraction and has no life in itself. It will never revert back to you or change itself. This temptive corollary connecting emotions to God can be written in a general form as:

S3.1: To deal with your emotions, you need an object which is singular/inaccessible/unique and allows you to (sometimes) sit back, relax and ponder over the optimistic attributes (rivers, mountains etc.) offered by life without ever questioning the nature of reality of them. You have to make sure that in the whole process, you do not deal with object of analysis itself. All you need to do, simply, is love/feel.

Diagramatic summary: