3/ Love as a Problem

A question arises at the outset: what are these conditions of love, and how many might there be? We find ourselves compelled to uncover these 'Tablets of Laws' of love.

Love thus becomes something that 'can no longer be taken for granted'. Once again, I find it difficult to locate suitable terms to express this idea. Perhaps we might say that love becomes a 'demanding' concept.
What does this mean? When love was understood as merely a feeling of subjective pleasure derived from proximity to or thought of the beloved, it was easy—or at least easier—to determine whether we loved a particular being or object. For instance, I enjoy looking at nature and walking in it; therefore, I love nature—it is as simple as that.
If we now acknowledge that love, by its very nature, carries its own conditions, a new question arises: have we respected all these conditions in our relationship to the object? If it turns out that we have violated one of them, our relationship to the object ceases to be love and becomes something quite different.
As a result, it becomes uncertain whether we truly love the object, even though we intend to. Put simply, we wish to love the object but fail to do so. In other words, love itself becomes a problem.

Love becomes problematic because, until we have identified each of its conditions, we cannot be certain that we are not violating one of the requirements inherent to love itself. We may consequently come to realise that we have never truly loved what we believed we fundamentally loved.

The question that arises, in our perplexity, is this: into what exactly does our 'loving intention' degrade when it fails to meet one of love's conditions? It degrades into the precise opposite of love: contempt. A concrete example may help to illuminate these abstract ideas.
We sometimes admire the kind of phrases that lovers exchange in moments of eloquence: 'I love you without knowing why!' or 'I love you for no reason'.
On closer examination, we may realise that these phrases are in fact insults disguised as compliments—expressions of contempt masked as love. They amount, in essence, to telling the beloved: 'No matter how much I look at you, I cannot see what makes you valuable'. The lovers, of course, do not intend this—they genuinely wish to love one another. Their intention remains unfulfilled, however, because they violate a requirement inherent to love's very essence.
This requirement—which we may have uncovered in the course of this brief analysis—demands that the lover be able to articulate what makes the beloved valuable. Without this, the feeling risks becoming one that, if fully expressed, might run: 'I believe you have value, but it is possible I am mistaken—that you have none at all and may even be despicable'.

Here we arrive at the fundamental notion of 'disguised contempt'—contempt concealed within love.