Think of a river. A river can be shallow or deep. The surface can be tumultuous or calm. The current can be strong or weak. Emotions are exactly the same. An emotion can be shallow or deep. It can be written all over our faces or kept beneath a calm exterior. It can pull us into action or be kept completely under control.
Today, I want to talk about the difference between shallow and deep emotions. Shallow emotions are all about what happens to you. Think of an engine. When you hit the gas pedal, it revs. You win the lottery (pedal), you feel excitement (rev). Your dog dies (pedal), you feel sadness (rev). You pass your midterms (pedal), you feel relief (rev). See what I’m saying?
Shallow emotions are important to us. They control the animal parts of our brains — instincts, reactions — and that’s where we live most of the time.
But, as I’ve said before, we are Homo sapiens. We understand the deep emotions.
Deep emotions are all about who you are. What does an engine do when you don’t do anything to it? It idles. Still revving, but doing so at a slow, boring, continuous rate. Like with your family. It doesn’t matter what they do to you, it doesn’t matter how much they rev you up, you always come back to idle: you love them.
We tend to give idling less attention. It’s consistent, reliable, easy to take for granted. It’s a shame that, often, what we really go after in life is revs.
When we look for romance, we don’t look for someone we’d be happy to live with for the rest of our lives, someone who’s strong where we’re weak, someone who makes us better. We look for someone who excites us, who turns us on. And then we hope they meet the other criteria.
A lot of dating is going on a soul-crushing sugar binge until you happen to stumble across a salad with a tasty dressing.
The shallow/deep dichotomy can be kind of confusing sometimes. A lot of emotions are just shallow: lust, jealousy, pleasure. But then we’ve got some words that could be shallow emotions or deep emotions: love, happiness.
So let’s have a look at all the different things that we just lump together under the name “love.”
At its most basic, love is what you feel when something makes you happy. It’s the emotion that drives reciprocation. When brownies or fast cars or your favorite TV show make you happy, you start to care about what happens to brownies and fast cars and your favorite TV show. You want to bring more brownies into the world. You get sad when a beautiful car gets crashed, you get angry when your favorite TV show gets cancelled. Because you love them.
On a slightly higher level is that but with people.
For simple, platonic love, all someone has to do is make you feel good about yourself once and, suddenly, you care about what happens to them. You want them to like you. You want to make them feel good about themselves.
Then, there’s what you might call “romantic love”. It’s just platonic love plus lust. It’s someone who has made you feel good about yourself at least once. And also you want to have sex with them.
Sex is an incredibly powerful emotional catalyst. Sometimes feelings of romantic love are based entirely on a good sexual relationship. And even when the romance is based on more than that, the love can really feed off the sex and the sex can really feed off the love.
But at the end of the day, it’s still just a surface emotion.
Love at first sight, that’s where you see someone and you immediately imagine what you wish they were. Maybe you’re imagining them as the perfect companion, the perfect co-parent to your children. Or maybe you’re imagining them naked. Whatever it is, you get to know them and they make you happy and, slowly, over time, that perfect image in your head conforms to the way they really are and the love you had for the perfect person fades into love for this person.
Romantic love has a bad habit, in some people, of devolving into desperate love. That’s where either the love isn’t reciprocated or the person turns out not to be who you fell in love with. But you’re so afraid that you won’t find someone else, you’re so afraid of being alone, that you cling to them, hopelessly hoping that, deep down, they are great, that they are worthy of your love, that your life with them is better than your life without them.
But it’s not. And you know it.
All these kinds of love are fickle. How did you feel about Game of Thrones after the last season came out? How many of your best friends from ten years ago are you still best friends with? Are you still in love with the first person you fell in love with?
There’s nothing lasting about surface emotions. Like a muscle, any surface emotion that isn’t constantly re-exposed to strain will atrophy.
Or it will have to grow into deep love. There are two kinds.
First is eternal love. Like a shadow, it’s always there, easy to forget about but completely inescapable. It doesn’t matter if they hurt your feelings. It doesn’t matter if you have major disagreements. It doesn’t matter if you never see each other. You just love them and there’s nothing either of you can do about it.
Then there’s companionate love, where you know someone intimately, you know all their flaws, you know they’re just going to keep pissing you off, but you crave them. You’re used to their presence. When they’re not around, you miss them. While desperation is about being too weak to be without them, companionship is about being strong enough to deal with them.
Shallow kinds of love depend on whether a person deserves to be loved. Deep love is understanding that no one deserves to be loved all the time and doing it anyway.
