This is the third installment of Madeline Hall’s column “Weird Love” which discusses the many oddities of affection as they appear in the year after the world didn’t end.
My hearing appears to be worsening these days. The number of times I have to lean toward a speaker with a particular ear, a la Grandpa Style, has been increasing with disconcerting frequency. On the heartening contrary, my eyesight maintains its 20-20 status, and my sense of smell could beat out a German Shepard on a good day. I try to keep a mental record of these measurements, informal as they may be, for the sake of self-awareness and in keeping with my premature preoccupation with morbidity. There are some things you can’t shake, like a familiarity with the lines around your eyes, or the smell of curry.
Love isn’t a sense in the way we learned in elementary school. We tried to disassociate our connection of the heart with emotion, despite its metaphoric convenience and the preponderance basic symbolism in our curriculum. Rather, we were taught that the heart pumped blood – valves, arteries, and walls. In middle school, we definitely didn’t learn to assign bodily organs with affection. We did that on our own, furtive and incomplete in our attempts to understand how what we felt was some variant of love. Shame, in that way, enters the picture, which at the time was incompatible with a childlike understanding of love. It’s only when we graze adulthood that shame and love cease to feel so disconnected.
But there’s always talk of that loving feeling, or of feeling love, and it cannot go overlooked that in a sense, love is a sense. Straddling that noun/verb line that muddles our own English sentences, “love” as a word embodies sense. And that, of course, makes sense.
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