The Answer

This is me and my grandma Margarita. We were born on
the same day and I loved her more than anyone in the world.
She died while I was in the UK because life sucks like that
sometimes.

Today’s blog post is about one of the topics that you chose. That topic is your first love. 

I have two first loves because I’m pretty sure they happened almost simultaneously, since in my earliest love-feeling memories they both occupy the same place. My first loves were my mom and my grandmother (my dad’s mother, that is). 

Now how do I know I loved them? I guess it’s because I was so scared of losing them. Also, because I would have given my life for them. Now, this sort of makes me wonder about love. Is that love or just selfishness/fear? What is love really? I think about it a lot, and I always reach different conclusions. 

There are different kinds of love. For instance, we have fraternal love and romantic love. Maybe there are more kinds, but those are the only two I can think of right now. I don’t really think I believe in romantic love anymore. I believe we relate different feelings and emotions to this thing we have called (romantic) love, which is a cultural construction we developed for some reason. Maybe as a way to ‘humanise’ us and differentiate us from other animals (to make us appear less instinctive, perhaps). Or maybe as a way to justify our need for company or fear of being alone.

Many feminists have written about maternal and romantic love
as facilitating gender oppression. Silvia Federici
 has written about this from an anti-capitalist perspective. With
the famous sentence 'They say it's love. We say it's unwaged work'
pretty much summing it up. I also found this 1986 paper by
Alan Macfarlane which refers to capitalism and love.
I haven't read it yet, but it looks quite
 interesting.

I’ve heard that love is all you need, that love is the answer and other similar discourses. Well, when I think about the current state of the world, I think what we actually need is solidarity, and solidarity is the answer. However, love makes us, the individuals, feel better. And we are all about individuality in this consumerist world, aren’t we? Also, love is probably a more useful concept as well, since it keeps the world functioning the way it does. Traditional romantic love is assumed to (eventually) provide the (supposedly) appropriate conditions for the effective reproduction and development of people (aka the labour force). Also, it keeps us separated from our broader community (since a couple or the nuclear family are not a community in themselves. In fact, it has been claimed that neoliberalism needs people to be separated so they don't organise). So maybe the idea of romantic love is just a convenient way to help reproduce the status quo... In that sense I don’t think I like it too much. I hate the concept as well, but I do like the feeling. When I feel romantic love, I always wish the feeling never ended. It is like a drug, isn’t it? but luckily, it’s not eternal, because it makes me numb and I hate being numb.

But, anyway, tell us about your first love and/or your thoughts about this feeling. In your post you can mention:

1. What you think love is
2. If you’ve ever been or felt in love
3. Why you think you loved that person/those people
4. How you know it was love
5. Anything else that may be relevant to the topic

• This entry has to be written in 230 words
• Leave comments in 3 of your classmates’ posts
• Leave 1 comment on my post