There is a certain conceit at play when one says, “I like you” to another. We don’t notice this easily when we appreciate things precisely because things are seen as objects — of lesser value, as a wholly inferior class of being. To appreciate connotes weighing, judging, adding value to the object of interest.
In the act of liking a person, we take a couple of things for granted: that the one who values is of value himself, and beyond this, that he is a competent evaluator. I like you is my bestowing my personal stamp of approval, having significance and substance, on you.
Also not very apparent is this system of appreciation’s resting on rational parameters — rational in its mathematical sense, and probably precise. It does not appear as such because we are hardly aware of its full ramifications, being so used to it. Nevertheless, you can intuit this idea in the way we trade our likes. The person of little social worth may declare that they like one of higher value, and the statement is treated lightly, even with levity. If the one of higher value accepts this appraisal, he does so tongue-in-cheek, as one would take a child’s babble for the bauble it is, an imitation of effective speech. Of course, the sky is blue. Reverse the situation and the scales are over-tipped, having the person of small stature intoxicated with praise — and he can thus be induced (empowered too) to do anything! Like goes one way; adoration the other.
The illustration above is too vague, broad and unmathematical. One should be able to isolate the constant, variables, and relating formula of a rational system through which we could accurately describe the system or predict the results of its application. However, social experiments are incredibly capricious and don’t fit well into formulations. Or perhaps this is just me whose eyes water and train of thought decouples on seeing elaborate mathematical formulas shirking a task that would generate such a formula.
So here is the suggestion of how to generate a formula: To valuate is a basic human attribute, to distinguish between items in a set, discriminate against or be biased toward one or a few, and to present the favored with inordinate attention. (This is common to all life but this facility in humans is distinguished by its extensive social aspect) To like puts a value on parameters such as amenity of object, rank among like and relation to unlike close by, fit for purpose, and affinity with subject. One tallies up these values and assigns them to the valued. As everyone is evaluated and evaluator at once, we present signs of the value constantly and read these off others. When we encounter others, we make reviews of their values which are reflected on these counters, so to speak, based on the experience. The one of higher social worth is no more than one who has garnered more atomic ‘like’ stats.
To say “I love you” is a different matter, and not in the same league as “I like you”. “I like you” and “I like you very much” represents different orders of magnitude as 1 and 10 do. “I love you” and “I love you very much” are essentially the same statement, the seeming greater only hyperbole. One cannot like and dislike a thing all at once, but decry one’s love and hate for a thing, and have the understanding (and usually sympathy, too) of those who hear this. Love is patently irrational. One likes with one’s head; to love is a headlong activity.
To buttress the above, observe how the language of love turns everything it touches on its head. We’ve known since the first man who felt a headache realized his cognitive impairment was related to it that the head is the seat of reason and imagination and awareness. But look, it is with our heart, that dumb, brawny, four-chambered, blood-pumping organ that we love. Everything that follows in this venture has a glancing touch with reality; only a thin tether grounds it and prevents it from flying off into space (and possibly bumping its head against the underside of Mars). This spotty touch with reality is the source of the incurable bond between love and poetry.
(Poetry is the sort of vehicle for love because it is a floating island in a sea that, by a magnetic pull, forces us to reach it from the far shores by what shifting, shifty, makeshift footholds we can contrive. Prose works fine with liking because it fashions a firm span from end to end, a pontoon, a rope bridge, even a slight rope: a solid link to, a hi-fi definition of, the object of interest)
“You love her,” they ask him.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
And he is tongue-tied. Love is the stuff of heavy lips. He strains to admit the uninitiated into his experience. The moment he begins to speak in intelligible terms, he loses his love. He mixes concepts in his mind, and he ventures to speak—it is what we like that we can define the why; we can hardly understand what we love. We have a rein on the things we like but our loves yoke us. So the moment he begins to enumerate traits, he loses, reason by reason, his love and gains a liked thing.
The one who loves cannot appraise. He loses depth perception, his weighing scale goes wacky, and he can’t reasonably reckon priority or propriety. He loses bearing to a pole because he is in a liminal experience, a vast uncharted edge—how do you pole the dimensions of a place never trod. That’s why it’s hard to admit aliens into its realm.
Is it a surprise that a person is said to be madly in love? The tune he dances to, only he can hear its frequency range. He spends a fortune on a treasure only he can see, and that under a certain light and aslant. He swears, shakes his fist, laughs uproariously, everything he does he does to the hilt—for something that excites him alone. The wine that brews his vibrant passions is pressed directly from the void. We shake our head at him and try to avoid him in his state if we can because, on some level, we understand that he plays a dangerous game with poor odds, is infected by a terrible, terribly infectious disease. The length of a nose past the edge of exploration, who knows what lies there? And once caught in its spell, who can resist its pull? What lies beyond can easily be an abyss, rarely the path to a trove, and far more likely (and depressingly so) the unimpressive continuation of landscape just left behind.
The give-and-take of likes does not apply here. Whatever he has to give has no receiver, for he has yet to demonstrate its applicability in our ‘like’ system. Heck, he can’t even explain it well. We don’t know if it can exchange for anything and he might as well be clutching at thin air. So, by dint of circumstance, the state of love must be creative, generative, amply so. In fact, he has no mind to receive at all. He is propelled from within by something that threatens to explode him if he reclines a little too long. And this is just as well, for sometimes it is from this very profuse creative output that the abyss is bridged and the unremarkable landscape is transformed into a paradise.
It is not hard to think that the one who loves could contently inhabit his dizzying wild world alone, but he often desires to share this with others. Why does he set out in the public domain a private affair? Maybe this is a bid to tame it, and he introduces us to the possibility of evaluating his gifts, for good or bad. He must initiate its translation into more adaptable terms for us to do anything with it. Maybe ‘like’ is what results when a chunk of love is broken down by uninspired human eyes. Here is a mathematical equation for you: the acid of love plus the base of human interaction results in a mass of small salt crystals of like in the aqueous solution of our common experience.