Love…?
From the Vaults: February, 2015
I think a lot, about… Love, intimacy and relationships. It is a greater phenomena for me personally, than consciousness itself. Love is undoubtably, just as mysterious as the thought of consciousness. Who can really put their finger on it. I sure as cannot. What makes us attracted to one another? Is it looks, is it tastes, is it smells, is it conversations, compatibility, is it character? Is there really a thing as "Love at first sight?" Do parents who spend most of their time arguing really love each other? Do parents who spend more time focussed on their work, or worse, drugs and alcohol, love their children? What is this concept of Love anyway… Honestly where did it even come from? We use language as a tool to try to help us better understand the way we feel inside, or what we are thinking, thus logically someone must have been feeling a certain way that they could find no other way to describe than with those letters, L, O, V, E… Yet english wasn't even the first language… so what was the way to describe Love in cuneiform? Can there be multiple different forms of Love?
Yes, I would think so. Here's why: I believe the "Love" we refer to when thinking about intimate others and relationships, is absolutely a different kind of "Love" than say, the fact that we might love riding our bikes long distances in the early mornings or, we might Love creating music, art, or poetry. However is that the same type of "Love" we refer to when we express it to someone we are in a relationship with…? Of course there has to be different kinds of Love. Your mother's love, isn't the same type of love you have with your spouse.
Thus we understand that Love can mean two (or more) different things depending on context. (I guess like most concepts). We also know that Love can drive us "mad", whatever that means. If Love is this thing that we don't quite understand and can drive us to the point of insanity, then why are so many of us so concerned with it… The deeper question may be that, if Love is so unknown, and yet we seek it anyway, then there must be an unknown part of ourselves which we are trying to understand, and fulfill. Dale Carnegie writes that about 95% of us, make our choices, take actions, make decisions based on the simple fact that we have a desire to feel important. This makes a lot of sense, everyone wants to, quite possibly needs to, and should, feel important. I mean when one loses all sense of feeling any importance at all, what's the point right? That's when we hear bad news. We seek Love because it makes us feel important.
But is that enough? Can it just be resolved there? What happens when the Love becomes a Pain, a tragedy. Divorce rates are higher than half of all marriages in the U.S. today, which leads to the question: does Love last? Can intimate relationships stay creative, energetic, romantic, and fun? Or do we become comfortable in our routines with the other person? One of the great tragedies of the Human Condition is that no matter how hard you ever try, you will not be able to Know what I am thinking, and like wise, I will never be able to Know what exactly it is that you are thinking or feeling. How do we ever come to make relationships work? How can we understand the other person enough to predict what they will want and then act on this prediction to keep them falling "in love with us" over and over again. Keeping the relationship "fresh" is without question one of the most difficult tasks. When one comes from a broken relationship the question becomes, "was I a Love child, or just a sex child?" How often is sex confused as love, and love confused as sex?
That feeling of one's heart dropping into their stomach, shock waves of bio-electric current rattled through the nervous system, Love moves us. However painful, however mysterious and awe provoking, without it life would be bland, tasteless and melancholy. When we're in Love it is the Highest of all Highs, even if we eventually have to come down and suffer the withdrawals.
Ian Vincenzo Crispi