all you need is not love.

It was just Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, and I felt barraged by promotions of love:

even Dr. King looks afflicted in this one.

There's a problem with this. Love cannot solve everything.

Think about it. If you loved everyone, who would you have to blame? How would you get anything done?

While the above statements are worth consideration, my argument against love is not predicated on a need to blame. But the expectation of love to solve everything–differences, tensions, hard feelings–can lead to serious disappointment. You can't love everyone because the connoted intensity of the feeling would blind you to understanding what those differences, tensions, and feelings are made of.

FOR EXAMPLE, you are in an argument with someone, pitting your beliefs against his or hers. The topic could concern politics, religion, lifestyle. How would love benefit you there? 

I don't agree with you, but I love you, so let's stop arguing.

If someone said this to me, I would think they're using love as an excuse, as a way out of trying to understand what I'm talking about, what I'm thinking about, and maybe why I'm thinking in that way.

Now, here's the first showing of my answer to the dilemma, my remedy for disagreements, personal issues, and social problems: not love, but a will to understand. 

Consider the following statement, which I've come to hear and see frequently enough to register a maxim, taken from the New Testament of the Bible:

Love thy neighbor as thyself.

Sigmund Freud called the expectation veiled by the easiness of saying–and superficially believing in– the exhortation unrealistic. "Love thy neighbor as thyself," misconstrues human nature, and disregards the individual right to choose who to love, and how.

Freud. 

A lot of social exchanges on the psychoanalyst ultimately denigrate him. Most conversations I've heard about Freud default to his psychosexual theories, depend on terms like "phallic stage" and "penis envy," "Oedipus conflict" and a quick reference to cocaine to discredit his work and, finally, to verbally confirm their lack of sexual interest in their mothers.

But I think that if you think you have to love thy neighbor as thyself, or love a stranger or someone you don't enjoy being around, you will end up hating yourself, doubting your worth as a human, and be bothered by a perceived inability to love.

An interaction will leave you feeling angry. You will become angrier if you deny yourself the right not to love.

"All you need is love" says John Lennon.

Nope.

Message from religion: "Love thy neighbor as thyself"

I hear Freud was pessimistic. In his writings, he does not communicate the sunniest perception of human nature. But he was a psychoanalyst. He tried to understand. YES there are ethical concerns about his practice, but he did not think that love was an answer to the woes of society, or the chasms between people. LOVE is not an guaranteed, pliable answer to every situation. I do not want to love everyone, for that would be EXHAUSTING.

If understanding is step towards love, then, maybe I can try to start.