love does not begin and end the way we think it does.

Love did not mean anything to the women and men of medieval England. The verb "to love" in Old English was lufian, and the definition of lufian, "to love," is in quotation marks for a reason. There was no direct translation, though that is how the modern word was born. The word meant to cherish and to approve, and these are definitions that do not belong in quotations. There is a special word for "to love God" because religion defined these peoples' existence (after the whole Christianity cross-over thing). Faith, sin, honesty all determined human worth.

Linguistically, I believe that words are arbitrary. Most people would agree with me, though early philosophers would have not. They wanted so terribly to believe that words made sense. They wanted to believe words had derived from some ideal form that determined the shape of letters, the sound of syllables. I think otherwise. So, similarly, I believe that the value we place on words and concepts in our culture is arbitrary, each word with its long and serpentine history of change and refinement and reconstruction. Oftentimes, these histories derive from common literary themes, political climates, and, more recently, advertising and mass media influence.

And so I believe the same is true of love's dominance in the American psyche. Love is a quest? Love is a feeling? Love is an end-point? Love is a springtime rejuvenation, flowers sprouting, leaves shifting from brown to green? All of this language - which we hear so commonly in movies and television, derives ultimately from popular literature, the very heart of written language itself. Just as the media has created popular stances (opposition to Vietnam, preference for stick-thin women), literature has made love the dominant factor in determining human value.

Not much has changed, then, since the Anglo-Saxons dominated England. I mean, the foundations themselves haven't changed. We still rely on dominant cultural narratives to constitute our definition of human value. But if you look at progressive literature, alternatives emerge. Victorian novels like Villette, a book that dared to work against the era's popular narrative of "boy, girl, love, love, love, sexual tension suggested in looks and touches, marriage, happily ever after," love is something else entirely. Love does not even figure into the manifest plot. Instead, Bronte erases love as an easy alternative to self-definition. Lucy, the main character, must forge her own definition of human value, which she settles into a mixture of learning, profession, friendship, and independence.

Perhaps, then, there are a multitude of other ways to define yourself. Perhaps love is an antiquated life goal. Perhaps we should move toward something a little more sophisticated. Of course (and this is unfortunate), this applies mainly to women. Men have been taught since the very first bildungsroman (written by Goethe, in case you were wondering) and even before, that they have alternative life paths to follow, alternative ways to find value in their existences. I think many of them still choose to place love as number one, though. And I know many women who do the same without exception. They move from one man to the next, hoping one of them will complete the puzzle, put it all together, and say, "Look, we did it, it's all over now. Relax." This will never happen, and that's why love as a dominant value is inherently skewed.

I have decided for myself not to define human value in these terms. I have decided for myself to accept another literary perspective that Baldwin created: love is a growing up. The growing up is what is significant, not the love itself. Growing up is being mature enough to realize that love should not define your world, that compromise is necessary, and that, in the end, it's you yourself who decides if your decisions make you happy. You write your own narrative. You write your own ending.