What is “Love” anyway? I know, I am beating a dead horse here but just thought I’d give my personal view on the subject. People will debate this question, women have certainly given it much more thought but it has undoubtedly been on everyone’s mind at some point in their lives. Myself, I do not think there is a right or wrong answer.
I was chatting with a friend this morning. Well, the new high-tech way that very busy close friends talk nowadays….via email, and the subject came up. As a little girl playing with Barbies, love was Ken. The perfect man, looking good no matter where he was and what he wore. He would bend on one knee and kiss my hand and we would drive away together in a shiny sports car. I would look ravishing, my hair flowing in the wind. Somehow, that was love.
Growing up through my teens love was romance. Long walks on the beach, sipping wine by the fire and listening to him tell me everything I wanted to hear. We would have a house and babies and good jobs to take vacations to exotic places. Of course the cost of a mortgage, raising a family and the 300 % hike in gas rates never found its’ way into that dream! I never envisioned just how much work “love” would be. The fights over money, house cleaning and schedules just never seemed to enter my mind, it was all about sweet romance.
As an adult I have learned that for me, love is not an emotion but a state of mind. It is the acceptance of one another whole heartedly. It is not about looking ravishing all of the time but being at your worst and more comfortable than ever with one another. It is not all about the romance, the flutters in your stomach when you kiss. It is about having a real bad day and letting all of that go when you’re together. It’s about admitting your mistakes, making known your flaws and being accepted for all that makes you, you. It is him telling you the things you don’t want to hear and being thankful that he shared those thoughts with you.
To know if you have loved you have to feel heartache. The emptiness and the loneliness. If you have felt that then you have truly loved. Be thankful for that heartache as it shows you are capable of opening up yourself to love. It is a gift to be a part of, no matter how it works out in the end. It is a wonderful place for the mind to be.
Love, as an emotion is an intimidating concept for me. Emotions run deep but they are created by the environment around you, the atmosphere that you are in and combined with the biological make-up of your being. All of these things you have no control over, atmosphere, environment and biology therefore making emotion uncontrollable If I allow myself to believe love to be an emotion then I feel I would have to sympathize for those that kill for love, that a spouse that kills his wife out of jealousy is justified in doing so because emotion is so uncontrollable. Most like to feel that they have no control over who they love and thus consider it an emotion. I believe that you allow yourself to open up to someone. You make that conscious decision to become a part of someone else. You have that control, not the emotion. If we truly had no control over whom we loved society would be even more unstable. We would see fathers and daughters openly loving one another as husband and wife. Same for brothers and sisters, co-workers, neighbors and so forth. Yes, these things do go on but they are not the norm. Why is that? Because we know there are limits, boundaries to who we can love and who we cannot. We have that control. If we have that control then it could not possibly be an emotion because emotion is uncontrollable! See where I am going with this? Ok, it makes sense to me, perhaps not to all of you but just thought I’d share my complex view on this. So just what is love to you?
3 comments:
love-LOVE- what does the word mean???it has soooooooo many meanings that it has become "meaningless"--for a word to be usefull in commuicating there must be some common agreed upon understanding of its meaning& that does not exist for the word "love"--you describe the hollywood version of love& the the realistic version of life that we call love-- then there is the casual love like in the phrase-- "love ya" given when parting--perhaps we shud do away with the word hahahah
Belle, as bright and loveable as you are, I'm afraid you've lost me on this one. 'Love' is indeed an overworked word which is ambiguously applied to a lot of different relationships, but I can't think of one in which 'emotion' isn't a crucial component.
That said, just because an emotion is an automatic response doesn't mean we have to act on that emotion. We negate and choose not to act on emotional responses (anger, lust, etc.) everyday: and thank god we do. To have any sympathy for someone who jealously murdered his wife is to miss the point about what it means to be human.
And I thought I was the perfect Man!
Ken...........????
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