—
In her 2017 TED Talk, entitled “A Better Way to Talk about Love”, speaker Mandy Len Catron discusses the way that we as Americans describe love, and how it can lead to fundamentally unhealthy relationships and ways of viewing our loved ones. She begins by saying that when we say we “fall” in love, we imply that it is “accidental… [and] uncontrollable”, like the act of falling itself. She also says that falling is something that “happens to us without our consent… and this is the … way we talk about starting a new relationship”. Catron also describes how when we are in love, or when love is taken away from us, we call ourselves “crazy”, “aching”, and then our “hearts break”. She equates these terms and metaphors with “extreme violence or illness”. She tells the audience about how the English word “smitten” can be defined as both “‘grievous affliction’ and ‘to be very much in love'”.
Catron goes on to say that our culture uses language to define things, but implies that we do not have enough positive words and phrases to describe the feeling of love. She suggests that instead of being “passive in love”, like in her falling metaphor, we “step into love”. She brings up a book by two linguists, “Metaphors We Live By”, by Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, and says that they came up with the metaphor of love being a “collaborative work of art”. This, she says, allows us to have consent and control over love, instead of just passively being led into it. It allows one to think of their love as making something bigger, with each person seeing what they can bring to the relationship.
This metaphor is relevant to any relationship, not just romantic ones – if we can view our interactions with one another collaboratively, as if we are creating a work of art, we could be more productive as a human race, and we could express that kind of agapē love much more clearly.
Catron, Mandy Len. “A Better Way to Talk about Love.” TED, 27 Jan. 2017, www.ted.com/talks/mandy_len_catron_a_better_way_to_talk_about_love?language=en.