Nobody has ever successfully defined love to the satisfaction and agreement of the world at large. Someone once said it is a feeling that you feel that you've never felt before. That could be any number of other emotions though...even hate.
People 'fall out of' love too. This, I've never particularly understood. If love is the emotion felt by a mother towards her child then love is unconditional and pure, right? There isn't any one thing the child does to earn the love. A child can earn his mother's trust or respect by conducting himself in a certain way but apparently you do not get to experience what a mother's love feels like until you become a mother yourself.I guess this automatically expels all the men in the world from experiencing this particular brand of love. And all the women who never have children.
The other kind of love that I am aware of is between a man and a woman. The one between Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet in Titanic that made him risk his life in the face of certain death by drowning to go and rescue her from her flooded cabin. Or was it the other way around? This kind of love is fierce( I've been told), it literally burns a hole through your soul and has a lot to do with the physical too. How then can we tell the difference between love and lust? Is lust a certain kind of love?
Then there's this other theory about 'love grows'. Back in the days, our grandparents and some people's parents said to them, there was nothing like dating or getting to know someone. It was really about finding a suitable man or woman and getting married. The love was sure to follow if the woman cooked the food in the right way and gave him kids of the right sex. Conversely if the man had a sustainable source of income and paid the brideprice upfront (no credit), all the boxes were ticked.The rationale behind this was that you do not stay with a person for 10, 20 years and not find something to love about them. We modern people today call this convenience. The last resort for the people who get to a certain age and think: 'that's it, the search is over'. See 'tick tock , now is the time' post.
Is love an emotional or a physical feeling? We're all familiar with pain but that too, it seems, is psychological. If you stick a pair of scissors into the leg of a paralysed person 5 times they do not feel it. Is there still pain but they don't feel it? Or is there actually no pain at all? I wonder if love is a bit like that, you close your eyes, put up a wall, disqualify the person but it's still there...only that you can't feel it.
A whole PHD could probably (or more likely has) be written on this topic. Love is a members only club it seems. People in love always say things like "you know when it happens". If you don't know, if you are plagued by doubts or insecurities about whether or not you are in love, does that then mean that you cannot possibly be in love?
ReplyDeleteI've also heard that when you're in love, while the relationship is not perfect, it is never as difficult as the other ones. It's somewhat easy. If you don't have this easiness, should you question the validity of your feelings?
I've also heard that if you're in love, the things that you do not like/tolerate in other people are no longer an issue. So if I have a boyfriends whose snoring I loathe, does that mean I am not actually in love?
I don't necessarily agree that with love comes an easier relationship. Perhaps you would be more willing to overlook the minutiae and pick your battles because you're so in awe of the person,and conversely when you do not like someone even the most trivial things that are wrong with them make you want to club them half to death. Like my friend who says she hates the way someone's breathes. So audibly!
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