A work in progress

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Warning: the following will kill the “magic” of love for you. Like the magician’s livelihood, it is the mystery that keeps it alive. Whether you want to leave it alone is up to you; but sometimes, that magician is a jerk and makes your wallet disappear. If you’d like to make sure that doesn’t happen, read on.

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The one thing about love that makes it so difficult for us all, is the complete lack of any real rules or guidelines. We are left to make our own understanding of this vague feeling. What we’re here to do today, is to define what love is exactly. It’s very important to know at least this much; as G.I. Joe once said, “Knowing is half the battle!” Here’s what they didn’t teach you in school, kids.

Love is simple.

Essentially, love is caring deeply for someone.

That’s it. You already knew that much, didn't you? Most everything written here, you’ll already know to some extent. The trick here is pruning the unnecessary (and often downright wrong) romantic notions that convolute the matter.

First, les us address the belief that there are many different "kinds of love". This is nonsense; love is love. There are merely different levels of relationships, with varying, arbitrarily established degrees of intimacy and time spent together. It's very important to understand this difference.

Speaking of which, our society’s system of relationships is somewhat broken. For some reason, we tend to reserve all our love and intimacy for a special relationship we have with but one other, which we hope will eventually become marriage. There is much wrong with this system. Granted, marriage in itself is a great thing, and it is generally ideal to live with another that one loves; but why should we only give our love to just one person? When we limit ourselves like this, we leave our other relationships lacking. It should not be weird to cuddle with a friend, or tell them that you love them. It is precisely because we do not properly love our friends, that we are so eager to find our life-long mate, as that is the only relationship in which we allow ourselves to truly love.

There is a lovely lie that one might like to live, the one true love; but the whole concept is just a romantic dream. Being romantic is fine and all, but you must make sure that the romance complements your life, and does not limit it. “The one”, for example, is a hindrance to oneself because it implies that love is something that is found. Some go so far as to imagine that love will find them.

If you are to take nothing else from this message, as least understand this much:

Love is not something to be found. It is a bond that you make.

If you believe in love at first sight, then you are an unfortunate fool. That is not love. Rather, it is infatuation.

Infatuation is the “magic” of love (and by “magic”, we mean “mystery”; the two are the same). It is that inexplicable feeling which strongly draws one to another, usually for little reason. This is simultaneously the catalyst and bane of love.

Infatuation is terribly irrational. It doesn’t take much to trigger it, and what does usually isn’t based on any real values. More often than not, the trigger is usually a good first impression that leaves much to the imagination. The blanks are then filled in by your imagination, and tend to lean towards the ideal. Anyways, whatever happened, if you become infatuated, say goodbye to your brain. You won’t be seeing it for a while.

Doubly dangerous is if the other person is equally attracted on the same basis. Then you might be inclined to believe that there’s something substantial to this magical (i.e. mysterious) feeling.

What’s so dangerous about infatuation in the first place, is that it is temporary. It will eventually fade, no matter what. Unfortunately, many relationships are brought to such a close and intimate level with mere infatuation as the foundation. When they fall apart, this is what is commonly (and erroneously) referred to as “falling out of love”.

Sometimes, a doomed relationship that should never have been continues, usually falling in and out often, even though it should have ended a long time ago. What (barely) holds these together, is the comfort stemmed from the sense of familiarity with the other person. Familiarity is a powerful thing. It’s what makes you like that song on the third listen, even though you didn’t like it the first two times. Unfortunately, we tend to restrict ourselves to the bounds of what we are most comfortable with, that which is already familiar to us.

Anyways, what this all has to do with love, is that infatuation is all too often mistaken for love. The two are very different things altogether. It is possible, however, that love can grow through infatuation. Something’s bound to become of all that time spent together, no? Make no mistake, though. It is a foolish gamble to take a relationship to such a level without some objective thinking and time spent getting to know each other, first. However, the folly of infatuation makes this very difficult.

People are always much nicer to people they like. If they're infatuated with you, it makes it a million times harder to judge what a person is truly like, even with objective thinking. At that point, it's better to watch how they treat other people. That's usually a better window to their heart.

Don’t expect anyone to be “perfect”. Nobody knows what “perfect” is. There is likely no such thing. Instead you should be looking for compatibility with yourself. This is different for each person. One universal trait one should look for, though, is “heart”. This may sound corny, but it only seems so because it is an often repeated truth of life. Most everyone values “heart” to some extent, whether they are conscious of it or not, so one might as well actively seek it.

This really makes sense. I'd like to hear more about this, and I'd like to know what you mean by this "heart" thing, even though it sounds like some stupid made up thing.

>>3
Heh, yeah, it's a pretty corny word. By "heart", I mean the general disposition of a person (way too long to refer to it that way). To have a good "heart" would mean that one is kind, thoughtful, etc. If you can think of a better word, I'd love to hear it, haha.

I'll add to this when I can think of more to write, which might not happen for a while. It's funny, I used to dream of writing a book about love, so more people could understand it; but as I came to understand love myself (through much unlearning, mostly), I found that there's not much more to write than a few pages on it. So I'll just write this and try to spread the word.

Live to love.