For all that poets and philosophers have written over the centuries, we are still incapable of accurately diagnosing and describing what we call 'love'. It is a complex melange of chemicals and psychology, an indescribable gravitational pull toward another person that is as inescapable as a black hole. We sometimes struggle to say the words to another person, because doing so is to commit to the unknown, to admit someone else has an almost magical power over us. That is a vulnerability we are not always ready or able to admit to, one that scares us into the desire to control the ephemeral.
History is littered with myths and stories about this. Love potions, love spells, Cupid's arrows; we seek to exploit and control love, because we know few pains as intolerable as being drawn to someone who notices our presence as much as Jupiter notices the fragments of rock we call its moons.
We seldom stop to think about the ethical ramifications of these urges. If we were to use divinity or magic to will someone into loving us, what have we accomplished? Love is not valuable if it is forced, nor would it feel the same to know it only existed because we created it for ourselves. What makes love special is knowing the other person has chosen you, of all other people, by their own free will. Removing that from the equation leaves us with nothing more than an organic automaton, which is as sad as those who have mastered technology for the sole purpose of creating their own artificial companions.
Ethically, things get even murkier. To force someone to love you is to assault their free will. Coercions of that kind are not notably different than using physical force or psychological abuse. The difference between controlling someone's heart and mind, and controlling their physical body, are matters of degree. Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that we have struggled to come to terms with how to deal with the most severe cases, if we still consider the more 'gentle' forms to be somehow romantic.
We have countless songs we can point to that describe love in its most noble form... or at least try to. Many of those songs also cross the line into creep territory, where the narrator doesn't understand or notice the entitlement to another person they are describing. What we don't have many songs about is the truth about love; the messy, difficult, complicated reality of two people coming together at the right place and right time.
Butterfly Boucher gave us one of those songs in "I Can't Make Me". The thing about love is that not only can we not control someone else's affections, we cannot control out own either. We may want to love someone, but our heart remains stoic. We may want to forget someone, but emotional cement does not stick in the etching of their name.
"I can't make me love you, and you can't make me either," the lyric tells us.
That is a fascinating admission to make in a song, and precisely the kind of nuanced thinking we get so little of in music. Butterfly is telling the subject that she knows they are sweet, and she does see the good in them, but that isn't the same thing as being in love. She refuses to lie to them, and more importantly she refuses to lie to herself.
"It's not a hurry that we're in. It's the pollen, it's the Spring."
Only time can tell if love is real. There are other emotions that come and go in the span when love is still finding its legs. Demanding we commit to the most intense and personal confession we can make is a sure sign the love was never real to begin with. That person pushing upon us is showing their 'love' is concerned only with their own experience. To truly love someone is to let them find their happiness in whatever form it takes, even if that does not include you.
When Butterfly is telling the subject to have patience, because she needs time, it is a test they are not aware of. True love would allow her to find her way to them on her own. Are they willing to wait?
The song is also interesting if your mind, as mine does at times, flips the pronouns. To think about a song saying we can't make the object of our affection love us is perhaps the lesson we all most need. Butterfly's song gets us halfway there, if we are intuitive enough to ask the follow-up question to it.
All of this means "I Can't Make Me" is one of the most interesting songs I can point to for deep thought, and what a wondrous bit of fortune it was to have happened upon it all those years ago.
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