Has Love Lost its Way?

The Uber driver had an FM station playing love songs.  I guess he was anticipating that his passenger would appreciate the selection. Whether he guessed correctly or otherwise (he didn’t) the songs piqued my curiosity about the content of love songs.  

I must confess I’m not overly romantic, so some of what I say could be construed as an indication of emotional shortcomings.  Fair point, but still …

Can what is being sung about in love songs ever fully relate to a living person or persons?  Is any one person capable of being the perfection of love, the zenith of human desire, the god or goddess we poetically imagine and long for? Maybe the songs aren’t suggesting that, but being poetry, are working with hyperbole -  which to say isn’t supposing anyone can be that person.  It’s the ideal, more the child of imagination than a description of reality.  

Bryan Ferry, the English musician and lyricist, wrote 

‘The Sun, the moon, and all the stars

bow down, 

when you pass.’ 

Elegantly said – but who could possibly command such grand deference.  Once again it will be argued that it is an allegory or speaking metaphorical about love, but you get my drift.  It may more appropriately speak of the universe in wonder filled obeisance to its creator.  I can see the sun, the moon and all the stars bowing as He passed,  although I doubt Mr Ferry has this in mind.  

My point is not to denigrate love, but to suggest what we yearn for isn’t capable of being fulfilled in this world, especially by a living person, which equates with what C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity,  “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”  We are setting ourselves up for failure if our goal is essentially other worldly in its ultimate realisation.    

I’m not suggesting our romantic cravings aren’t valid but that we ask too much from this world to match the intensity and yearnings of the fulfilment of love with any one person.  Are the yearnings and emotive expressions that fill books of poetry able to be fulfilled or realised in this world in the soulish and bodily congress of two people?  Or it is just good poetry? 

Has love lost its way by trying to find what can’t be realised in the here and now?  And is it possible that it is the God who is love that we are really looking for, and mistakenly thought can be found in a fellow creature?