Considering loves importance in our lives, do you find it interesting that in English we say "fall in love"?
To me fall implies an involuntary action done without true intention…
I think it’s possible to "fall" in love given that love is a force that can take us from heaven to hell in matter of minutes.
This tremendous energy overflows us in a sense – the ego sometimes has no saying in it.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
In Greek we have the word Ερωτεύομαι -ΕΡΩΣ = Eros.
There is no … fall, no.. trap!! I feel ‘eros”, with all the consequences!!
Thinking now about the German ‘verlieben’ and ‘verloren’ and the English ‘fall in love’, I think, there must be a meaning of losing our EGO. Beacuse we really lose our selfish self, I, when we are ‘in love’. We also loose our .. sanity. We all know that dream -like state, that we feel ONE with the Universe, that our Soul and Senses are wide open. The unbearable warmth, FIRE, in our body and heart and the feeling that we are lost in the SKY, in Exctasy! We lose the feeling of the three-dimensional world, SEPARATENESS. We conquer DEATH. We become LOVE, the diamond!
LOVE,
THELMA
ok.But in other languages is not the same.We cant take literarily each single word from one phrase.This is a mistake,and we might have more than funny results.What about”Is not my funeral”?or kick the bucket? taking words out of the context changes their meaning.Sorry
You are all so interesting… In Norwegian the word is ‘Forelske’, and I cannot find the etymological meaning of this word. I do believe it could be translated into English as ‘Beforelove’ as a love coming before the real love? Since Norwegian is a Germanic language, it probably has the same meaning as ‘verlieben’.
Anyway, this reminds me of a story a Vietnamese ‘little brother’ told me. He compared love to a pot of simmering or boiling water. In the Western world love starts very intense, the pot of water boils very high and all the water soon evaporate. The Vietnamese, or Eastern love, is the other way around, it starts very slow, with the water hardly simmering, and it keeps simmering and boiling slowly during the entire life, always making sure some water to remain in the pot.
It is similar in German: “verlieben”; “ver-” often is the prefix of “negative” words.
And the difference between “verlieben”, meaning “to fall in love”, and “verlieren”, meaning “to lose”, is only as small as one letter.
The same observation is true for other German words such as “verstehen”, which means “to understand” – trying to understand something with my rationality-focussed and scientifically educated mind often turned out to be the “best way” to keep real insight away from me…
Another example is “vergeben”, which means “to forgive” – in common sense forgiveness implies guilt and thus forgiveness in the common sense never will reach your soul. I heard that the literal translation of the phrase used in Laos to express forgiveness means that you give away your soul.
“Verlieben” and “fall in love”: Are there any other languages showing this phenomenon?
I think the English say this because ,its like fallen -head over heels -swept of feet -,knock my socks off ..all those terms people use to describe a feeling of great love ..like when people say I am falling apart = I think they think love is in parts ,when its not any small part of or piece of anything ..it has no limits -in falling or rising its the power of the emotion that one is describing -its whole and its powerful …not separate at all .
Blessings Tania
Interesting, I had never thought about it that way. “Fall” in love. Well, I’d say I fell in love with my husband. It was kind of like walking along and then whhhooommmpppp….falling into a hole or something. I didn’t have much control over it. But, seems like maybe we could use a better word than fall. Like, I “flew” into love.
Molly
I definitely think it is a “falling in” because once you recognize what has happened, it seems impossible to get out of! And that’s how it might be different from other emotions.
Sherry (EvolutionInConsciousness.blogspot.com)
When I think about falling in love I think about the idea of it and all the romantic implications that brings….the energy, the rush, the excitement……I also think about how it can burn bright and then burn itself out…..
When I think of love I think of how I am within myself…how well I know who I am….so when I say I love you..I is the most important word…because knowing who I am means I am ready to know who you are and to share our love in a deeper, longer lasting, perhaps not so exciting way……..
love Angela /Starlight(myspace)
There is a book called “Methodology of the Oppressed,” by Chela Sandoval. Though the language is dreadfully academic, I think her definition of what she terms “revolutionary love” is worth the effort in reading it, as she explains so well why there is, in fact, no other way to arrive in love other then to “fall” into it – an act quite beyond our personal intent or control:
“Differential consciousness is linked to whatever is not expressible through words. It is accessed through poetic modes of expression: gestures, music, images, sounds, words that plummet or rise through signification to find some void—some no-place—to claim their due…. It functions outside speech…. This mode of differential consciousness ‘can only be reached’…by human thought through an uncomfortable and ‘intractable’ passage… a conduit brought about by any system of signification capable of evoking and puncturing through to another site, that of differential consciousness.
“…That term, puncture, passage or conduit can be provided by the process of ‘falling in love.’ Third-world [I prefer Two-thirds world] writers such as Guevara, Fanon, Anzaldúa, Emma Pérez, Trinh Minh-ha, or Cherríe Moraga, to name only a few, similarly understand love as a ‘breaking’ through whatever controls…. It is described as ‘hope’ and ‘faith’ in the potential goodness of some promised land; it is defined as Anzaldúa’s coatlicue state, which is a ‘rupturing’ in one’s everyday world that allows a crossing over to another….
“…What we often detect in the shadow of our lover’s speech is that which is ‘unreal,’ which is to say, meaning when it is unruly, willful, anarchic. The language of lovers can puncture through the everyday narratives that tie us to social time and space, to the descriptions, recitals, and plots that dull and order senses insofar as such social narratives are tied to the law. The act of falling in love can thus function as a ‘punctum,’ that which breaks through social narratives to permit…meanings unanchored and moving away from their traditional moorings…. That is why… this form of romantic love, combined with risk and courage, can make anything possible…. It is love that can access and guide our theoretical and political ‘movidas’—revolutionary maneuvers toward decolonized being….
“To fall in love means that one must submit, however temporarily, to what is ‘intractable,’ to a state of being not subject to control or governance. It is at this point that the drifting being is able to pass into another kind of erotics, to the amplitude of…(the) ‘abyss.’ It is only in the ‘no-place’ of the abyss that subjectivity can be freed from ideology as it binds and ties reality….
“Once one recognizes this abyss beyond dualism,…any ‘injury’ created by a love relationship can only arise from one’s own ‘stereotypes’ that one lives out…. Once subjectified, ‘I become obliged, to make myself a lover, like everyone else; to be jealous, neglected, frustrated—like everyone else.’ But when the relation enters the realm of the abyss…then stereotypes are shaken, ‘transcended, evacuated.’ And jealousy, abandonment, frustration, for instance, ‘have no more room in this relation…. This form of love is not the narrative of love as encoded in the West: it is another kind of love, a synchronic process that punctures through traditional, older narratives of love, that ruptures everyday being. In this commitment, ‘excess and madness’ become…’my truth, my strength.’ In this formulation, indeed, they are (one’s) access to somewhere else; for through this love, insofar as it acts as a ‘punctum,’ as a coatlicue state,…(one) is transported into an original realm that is beyond jealousy… ‘beyond language, i.e. beyond the mediocre, beyond the generic.”
———–
So, basically love is not so much a destination as it is a borderland, a transliminal state of being. It cannot be marked out on any map, or found with our GPS. The only way to arrive there is through a state of total surrender – an act of “falling.”
Love,
Savita
ya! the falling part!
so irritating…
You “fall” into every emotion without intention. Emotions always arise from our subconscious mind. We can only learn to handle them well, but we cannot avoid their appearance.