According to St. Thomas Aquinas, to love is to will the good of the other as other. This seems like a good definition of love but also presents interesting implications.
For one, how does this compare and contrast loving someone and wanting someone to not be other? It seems to suggest that one can not simultaneously love someone and want to be one with them. Does one then go through an alternating current of loving and wanting them, and if so, what is the proper rhythm for such a current? Even if we accept this mutually exclusive approach to loving and wanting, we are unable to shake this thought that loving someone implies wanting them. But if we accept this implication, then we have a logical contradiction in our hands ([q^r^s^...]//[q^r^s^...] =>¬q). So is love a contradiction, and, if so, is that a problem? The skeptic in me wonders if this definition comes specifically out of a monastic Catholic tradition that forbids carnal love for its priests. Perhaps one who does not entertain romantic love does not easily see these implications. But then again some say this definition goes back to Aristotle.
This definition suggests that you can love someone you do not want and that in fact it might even be easier to truly love them. Jesus tells us to love our enemies, and it might be easier to prove we love them than it is to prove we love our family and friends. This reminds me of the Twenty One Pilots song lyrics:
"I'd die for you" that's easy to say
We have a list of people that we would take
A bullet for them, a bullet for you
A bullet for everybody in this room
But I don't seem to see many bullets coming through."
We say we love our close ones, but, in subsuming them into our lives and goals, we might simply see them as instruments to our well-being and ambitions. This is not only true of people but also of concepts and aspirations. We might say we love the planet or marriage, but really we love it because we see most of our lives in it and ultimately are just being self-centered.
This definition of love has theological implications as well. Perhaps with dismay, one might recognize that the Bible tells us that God loves all of us but does not tell us that he wants all of us. Perhaps those of us who end up in hell are those God actually loved but did not want (if that was possible). A pantheist might also take this definition of love to imply that God can not love us, for he can not see us as other, and that we can not love him either.
I believe that this definition is solid and what is dubious is our intentions. This definition of love challenges us to confront the tension between our desire to genuinely will the good of another as other and our instinctive inclination to subsume them into our own life and aspirations. This challenge is exasperated by the fact that we often think of those instinctive inclinations as love itself. After all, who does not want what/who they love? I think the best remedy to this tension is to, in our imagination, condition the other as free of us (as truly other) and ask what is good for it/them. As a final note, I should probably mention that the bible has a good paragraph on this topic (1st Corinthians 13) but I should stop there before the imposter syndrome kicks in.
