On Love
Love is an interesting fish to be quite honest with you.
You can't really define it; it's hard to even describe it.
The part of love that I was thinking about was the oft-used, pseudo-deterministic "we are meant to be together" line. This is what really sparked me to start thinking about this topic.
In particular, I found the word "meant" to be very interesting. The dictionary defines meant as "To design, intend, or destine for a certain purpose or end." However, this doesn't really seem to me to be the way that people use the word meant.
When people say "we are meant to be together" they mean meant in the way that people normally mean supposed to. They're actually saying "we are supposed to be together,"which is kind of an interesting way to think about it because they aren't actually saying that it's going to happen (like you would expect the word meant to mean). Rather, they mean that it should happen, or it's expected to happen, or that they want it to happen.
People are using this crazy phrase, "we are meant to be together," as if it is deterministic, as if it's going to happen and there's nothing you can do about it. But the way the phrase is actually conveyed it basically means "I want us to be together." It's amazingly no deeper than that. It's not calling out to a higher power, saying that some grand plan is causing us to come together and that we are meant for each other. It's just one person saying to another, "I think we should be together."
Even if the phrase is altered slightly, like to "we were meant to be together," all that would translate to would be: "we should've been together already." Using the past tense were is only saying that something should have already happened, but it hasn't. That instantly would rule out any determinism in the statement.
I really find this to be incredibly interesting, especially since I have, even recently, thought of the phrase "we are meant to be together" to be a sign that the person believes in some grand plan or something greater than themselves. But just by examining word usage it becomes fairly clear that this isn't necessarily what the person means. Intriguing...I'll have to look into this more in the future.
You can't really define it; it's hard to even describe it.
The part of love that I was thinking about was the oft-used, pseudo-deterministic "we are meant to be together" line. This is what really sparked me to start thinking about this topic.
In particular, I found the word "meant" to be very interesting. The dictionary defines meant as "To design, intend, or destine for a certain purpose or end." However, this doesn't really seem to me to be the way that people use the word meant.
When people say "we are meant to be together" they mean meant in the way that people normally mean supposed to. They're actually saying "we are supposed to be together,"which is kind of an interesting way to think about it because they aren't actually saying that it's going to happen (like you would expect the word meant to mean). Rather, they mean that it should happen, or it's expected to happen, or that they want it to happen.
People are using this crazy phrase, "we are meant to be together," as if it is deterministic, as if it's going to happen and there's nothing you can do about it. But the way the phrase is actually conveyed it basically means "I want us to be together." It's amazingly no deeper than that. It's not calling out to a higher power, saying that some grand plan is causing us to come together and that we are meant for each other. It's just one person saying to another, "I think we should be together."
Even if the phrase is altered slightly, like to "we were meant to be together," all that would translate to would be: "we should've been together already." Using the past tense were is only saying that something should have already happened, but it hasn't. That instantly would rule out any determinism in the statement.
I really find this to be incredibly interesting, especially since I have, even recently, thought of the phrase "we are meant to be together" to be a sign that the person believes in some grand plan or something greater than themselves. But just by examining word usage it becomes fairly clear that this isn't necessarily what the person means. Intriguing...I'll have to look into this more in the future.
posted by Stu at 2:25 AM
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