Lately, I've been bombarded with questions about love: What is it? Does it really exist? With whom can I have it? Are there variations of it?
There's platonic love and family love. There's love for your country and love for your self. There's fleeting love and useful love. All of these seem believable and real and almost ordinary. We encounter them regularly, take into account their varying kinds, and sometimes take them for granted.
But love in its most romantic, idyllic state - the It love - remains elusive, and therefore the most sought-after.
What is this It love that I'm talking about?
You already know.
We give It many names: true love, real love, finding the one, fairy tale love, perfect love, soul mates... It's that thing that Disney and Valentine's Day companies capitalize on. That thing that *we* crave. To be complimented. To be understood. To be completed. To be partners in perfection.
While we spend our lives actively figuring out the other kinds of love, It's this kind of love that most of us falter on. We learn soon enough how to trust people just enough to keep us from being isolated and perpetually hurt. We come to grips with the correct way to handle our families and understand ourselves. We manage somehow to put things in a perspective that we understand.
The difference between It and other kinds of love is pretty simple: ideally, you only get one chance to make It right. With friendship and country and morals and yourself, you have your entire life to figure out how you feel. You're under no pressure to know right now, at this very moment, who your best friend is. Or what kind of a patriot you are. Or who you are. You're free to be transitory with your beliefs, to actively alter your opinions on things, to change and evolve and come up with new ideas and new ideals - Because there's no pressure.
You don't have to worry about living up to this ideal of forever and always. You don't have to worry about damaging your ultimate relationship. You don't have to worry about being alone.
But It is the opposite of being alone: you feel like you're never alone. Someone else knows who you are and what you're about and what you mean. Someone else validates and acknowledges and understands and experiences the entire breadth of your personality and character and influence and beauty. Someone else took the amazing, alive, exhuberant, wonderful experiencing person that you were - and raised the bar to what you could be and experience and know.
It is so great that It can't be duplicated.
Attaining and retaining It is the ultimate accomplishment.
Unfortunately, however, most of us never attain It. And those of us who do, don't retain it.
I was reading nerve.com the other day when I came across this essay. In it, the writer talks about her feelings concerning marriage and the eternal question of true love. She hints at her romantic notions of love and those of fellow writer, Lori Gottlieb. And, most importantly, she deals with the question that's been pointing at me like the barrel of a gun: Is it better to be alone, or to settle?
Given that choice, I am ultimately and unequivocally a fan of the former.
5 comments:
you know.. I guess that depends. I used to have that outlook, until "it" happened. And now I suddenly understand why people falter. I understand the Kryptonites. I understand the saying, "it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all." The reason why it's so hard to duplicate is because the first time it happens, its the wildest rush you'll ever feel.
It makes you delirious with hope, the optimistic kind. It makes you euphoric, and your heart is very sensitive to the touch. It makes your chest feel in a way that's so, so similar to hurt, that it feels good. There was an occasion -- and I feel there will be more -- where I chose to love and leave rather than love and fight uselessly. I'm glad I got the opportunity to feel that kind of drunken hope. It completely rearranged me as a person.
And as far as having one opportunity to get that love, that "it" love, right... I also disagree (though I might just feel like I have to because this is the first time in all my years and relationships that I've felt "it," and I'm too young to accept that this will never happen again). I think this was my crash course love, the one I will learn my first lessons from. I feel that everything I open my heart THAT widely to will just be teaching me for the last love. The first love is nowhere NEAR as important as your last.
Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, but I still stand by the fact that I was a cynic, until it truly happened to me. I thought it did, but boy was I wrong.
I guess it is better to be alone given that you're perfectly comfortable in solitude or unwilling to stay in a commitment (among other reasons). I don't really know how "settling" is defined here, as it seems similar to "last chance at true love" based on the context. On my end, I know that love takes a little time and effort to be true, as well as who it is felt unto. It may not be what I perfectly want when I first feel it, but the happiness it brings me offers hope that it could be true and lasting. And then I commit, I work to have it grow and if it's a dead end, then I shall be a wiser man when it's over but I won't entirely dismiss the notion of finding something true again. Then the same process occurs.
It can't be helped if someone gives a little too much trust or whatever when the emotional state is achieved. I guess it's wrong give to much, too soon, but that's the way it is. "Be weak, if you want to love", as the song goes.
I don't think we have a perfectly firm grasp of our emotions and I don't think that can ever be achieved either. When it hits us, it just happens no matter how irrational or illogical it may seem to everyone else. Some even hurt themselves over it, but they are aware of the consequences and believe it is a price to be payed for something good to happen in the end.
"Ask a hundred people...", as the saying goes. Please don't take my thoughts seriously.
Text - It hurts, I know, to love so hard. I've been there. But it feels so good... Maybe it's the hedonist or the masochist or the idealist in me, but a heightened and unending verion of both those parts is exactly what I'm striving for.
A popular philosophical notion is that of the existence of the ideal, i.e., in God, in Love, et al. The idea is that there are lower representations of each of the ideals, and the very existence of these imperfect facsimiles is direct proof that the ideal exists. In some variations of this concept, this is because the ideal is the blueprint for the various wanna-be doppelgangers.
I say all that because I've experienced relationships that were varying degrees of closeness to perfection. To fairy tale love. To It... But none of them were It.
Still, the very existence of these relationships keeps me hopeful for the existence of It. How could there be things that are so close to the ideal, and yet no ideal?
Don't get me wrong - I don't want to demean any of those past relationships. I loved all of those men something crazy, and they loved me something... something. *laughs* We'd instinctively recognized and knew what each other was made out of, and we loved what we saw (- that's nothing to take lightly, I know). And, God, did they change me... in ways so deep that I'm still probably (subconciously) experiencing the alteration.
But the kind of love that I'm searching for is so great that it can't be duplicated. It's a one-time deal.*
*There are so many footnotes and elaborations on this subject that I'm thinking about writing an academic essay on It...
Pugs - "And then I commit, I work to have it grow and if it's a dead end, then I shall be a wiser man when it's over but I won't entirely dismiss the notion of finding something true again."
*jumping and pointing enthusiastically* That dead-end part is what I'm talking about. People who settle see the dead end and stick with the relationship anyway... Because they'd rather that than be alone. Because the sex is just really that good. Because they need the other person's money to be financially stable. Whatever...
What song are you quoting?
Light and Shade by Fra Lippo Lippi... and now it's officially my today's "Thought In My Head".
What is a dead end to one is another's happily ever after, I guess.
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