'Liking' versus loving

Jonathan Franzen

This is the time of year when college seniors put on their caps and gowns and go through the motions of listening to a commencement speaker. If they're lucky, the speaker will actually have something to say. And for those of us way past college, we're lucky if we come across an excerpt of a particularly thoughtful speech.

In that spirit, I highly recommend reading Jonathan Franzen's excerpted speech at Kenyon College. Franzen, the author of "Freedom" and "The Corrections," is widely regarded as one of America's finest authors.

In a piece that appeared in Sunday's New York Times ("Liking Is For Cowards, Go For What Hurts"), Franzen considers "the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb 'to like' from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice."

In today's world of techno-consumerism, "liking" has become a "substitute for loving," he says. In the process of collecting online friends, we delude ourselves into thinking we're engaging in real relationships instead of recognizing we're more likely stroking our own egos.

"To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors..." Franzen says. "My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love."

A loving relationship is imperfect and messy. It means recognizing your own -- and your partner's flaws -- and diminishing your self-regard, he argues.

"The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships"

Commencement speech or not, there's a lot of wisdom there. 

Photography by Greg Martin