So what have we learned from centuries of unrequited love stories? That the dynamic of love is driven by the experience of learning that it is something given, not something you can lay claim to.
It is generous and confident. Love cannot be commanded or ordered to fit the size of a person's needs; it cannot be shaped like play dough into whatever your heart desires. Love lives or dies on how it is given.
For all children, love is as essential as air. They deserve - no, need all the love they can get.
We know this because kids that grow up without knowing love have a big emotional gap in their lives that needs to be filled with something, and too often that something manifests as self-destructive behaviour. One of the few proven antidotes is high doses of time, care and love, but this falls outside the reach of government policy and legislation.
It is impossible to command a society to deliver love to the children of a nation. This is not to diminish the role of government in creating a policy environment that actively recognises and prioritises child-related issues but this only puts together the scaffolding while work is being done on the building of social cohesion and a collective sense of responsibility for the lives of children.
For adults, this role and the influences on the notion of how love functions have changed. While the value of love has remained a constant over centuries of human evolution, in recent times it has been diminished by commerce.
It has become a tradeable commodity and an entitlement rather than a social currency. The words "I love you" have become a meme rather than a meaning, and this makes it harder to pick the real thing out of the celebratory romances, shallow love songs, online dating gambits, magazine articles, advertising gimmicks and social media pressures to conform to a fantasy ideal of love.
For many people love has become distorted by a yearning to be loved that morphs into a demand - an entitlement that must be filled by someone or something. The advertising industry knows and understands this and it tells us we will "love" a new gizmo widget or that others will love the fact that we have one.
And so often we fall for it because we all need love. You can say that you love a thing but this will be an unsatisfactory, unrequited affair as a gizmo widget cannot love you back.
-Terry Sarten (aka Tel) is a musician, writer and social worker - feedback: tgs@inspire.net.nz
