Micaela Menárguez Carreño
Director of the Official Master's Degree in Bioethics at the UCAM
An author from the Middle Ages says that love is the essential gift and that everything else that is given to us without deserving it becomes a gift by virtue of love.
To love someone means to want his/her good. Aristotle already said so. To be infatuated is something else. Ortega y Gasset said that infatuation is an emotional impact which is produced when one meets a person and is captivated by him/her.
But infatuation is not love. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition for love.When a young man wants to know if he really loves his girlfriend he has to ask himself a question: Do I want the best for her, even though that might be uncomfortable for me? Am I willing to think of her good before mine? If the answer is yes, then he does love her. If he hesitates, then there is an important part of selfishness and quest for himself in his supposed love.
Likewise, when we want to know if someone loves us, we only have to ask ourselves if that person wants our good above all. When in a courting couple one of them gives up what he/she really wants for the good of the other, and this is done reciprocally, the other person becomes the meaning of his/her life. And then, only then, commitment appears.
We fall in love, whether we want it or not, because infatuation is involuntary. But we only love if we really want to do so. Because for love we need an ingredient that is like a magic wand that turns into love what infatuation proposes to us. And that magic wand is the will. We cannot get married just because we are infatuated, since we could be infatuated with anyone we meet. In each case, we have to carry out a rational analysis of the person who is the object of our infatuation.
