She's Mine.

"'When a man loves the beautiful, what does he love?' I answered her, 'That the beautiful may be his."

These are the words of Diotima to Socrates in the Symposium. Furthermore she says, " love may be described generally as the love of the everlasting possession of the good". The question of what love is has plagued mankind since the dawn of his creation. What does it mean, to feel something seemingly inexplicable and with power beyond our means? Love is a strange and captivating force, and we do preposterous things for our loves and our love itself. And none of us know what it means.

If we are to examine what Diotima says about the nature of loving in these lines, we can infer that to be loved is to be good. But what does that mean? We are taught that being "good" is entirely subjective, so what then does it truly mean to be "good", to be loved? Perhaps to be loved means to be seen as good in the eyes of another, our other half as Aristophanes would say. Is it true that we can only see the good in one we love?

Ditotima's words also bring up the concept of possession in love: "that the beautiful may be his." What does it mean to truly possess another, that which is good? What does it mean to say, "This is mine." The concept of possession, after all, is a strange one when one really thinks about it. We assign a part of ourselves to an object in order that it does not leave us. We are subservient to it at that point because we fear it's departure. We have all felt that tiny sense of sheer panic at the perceived departure of our cell phones or car keys. And in that moment, we seem less than what we were before, somehow bereft of concrete definition. In effect, we seek to assimilate these objects or beings outside of ourselves into our definition of who we are, into our very being. In our attempt to define these objects as "mine," however, they begin to define us. So what does it mean, really, to say a thing is ours? To be someones? As we can never truly assimilate that which is without into that which is within, the ability to own remains forever beyond our grasp; therefore, the idea of holding another as our own is but the attempt to integrate that other into ourselves as much as we can. Is this love? Maybe. Or maybe the very act of love is not that of holding as Diotima says, but of becoming.