in retrospect

Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words. Love is mysterious - and one result of the mysterious nature of love is that no one will ever be able to arrive at a truly satisfactory definition of love.

I can't define love. BUT I know I'm loved.

When we love someone our love becomes demonstrable or real only through our exertion - through the fact that for that someone (or for ourself) we take an extra step or walk the extra mile. Love is not effortless. To the contrary, love is effortful.

Will is the desire of sufficient intensity that it is translated into action. The difference between desire and action is equal to the difference between saying "I would like to go to the gym today" and "I will go to the gym today". Everyone desires to some extent to be loving, yet many are not in fact loving.

The desire to love is not itself love.

Love is as love does.
Love is an act of will.
Will also implies choice.
We do not have to love.
We choose to love.

No matter how much we may think we are loving, if we are in fact not loving, it is because we have chosen not to love and therefore do not love despite our good intentions. But when we do actually exert ourselves, it is because we have chosen to do so. The choice to love has been made.

Love and falling in love is not the same. We do not fall in love with our parents/siblings even though we may love them very deeply. We do not fall in love with our friends (by friends I mean, friends of the same sex, cuz there could be a possibility that we fall in love with a friend of a different sex - unless of course we are homosexually oriented).

The experience of falling in love gives us an illusion that the experience will last forever. This illusion is fostered by the commonly held myth of romantic love, wherein the prince and princess, once united, live happily ever after. The myth of romantic love tells us, in effect, that for every young man in the world there is a young woman who was 'meant for him' and vice versa. And it implies that there is only one man meant for a woman and only one woman for a man and this has been predetermined 'in the stars'.

When we meet the person for whom we are intended, recognition comes through the fact that we fall in love. We have met the person for whom all the heavens intended us, and since the match is perfect, we will then be able to satisfy all of each other's needs forever and ever, and therefore live happily forever after in perfect union and harmony.

Should it come to pass, however, that we do not satisfy or meet all of each other's needs and friction arises and we fall out of love, then it is clear that a dreadful mistake was made, we misread the stars, we did not hook up with our one and only perfect match, what we thought was love was not real or 'true' love, and nothing can be done about the situation except to live unhappily ever after or leave each other.

The myth of romantic love, is a dreadful lie. (Yes, shock, horror. Don't gag, this is coming from me.) Well, at least partially. I still believe that there is one person for me out there. But I just don't believe in falling in love and falling out of love anymore. Cuz if you love someone, you love someone forever. No such thing as I love you one moment, and I don't love you the next. And love is hardwork. (remember? EffortFUL.)

Other than 'falling in love', I realised I've also had a misconception about the dependency of love. I shouldn't love someone because I can't live without that person. That is.. parasitism, not love. When you require someone for your survival, you are a parasite on that person, and that is selfish. There is no choice, and no freedom. It is a matter of necessity rather than love. Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.

We all - each and every one of us - even if we try to pretend to others and to ourselves that we don't - have dependency needs and feelings. All of us have desires to be babied, to be cared for by people stronger than us who have our interests truly at heart. No matter how strong we are. But for most of us, these desires or feelings do not rule our lives; they are not the predominant theme of our existance.

I'm generally not a dependent person, but I know I have a dependent side. But at the same time, even though I want to be pampered, and babied, I want to do the same to the person I love. (And we can take turns pampering each other...)
I'm level headed enough to know that the only way to be assured of being loved is to be a person worthy of love, and no one can be a person worthy of love when their primary goal in life is to passively be loved.

Genuine love implies commitment and the exercise of wisdom. Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional. The person who truly loves does so because of a decision to love.

If you've actually read up till here, good on you, it must have been tough reading through my ramblings. Took me an hour and a half to type all this. Extremely incoherent, disjointed, but you get the drift. But I've been doing a lot of thinking and I just felt like penning it down.

I loved Jeev, and I still do. No one will ever understand why, and there is no need to explain, but if there is one person who does understand, that person can only be him. I won't stop loving him because I didn't fall in love with him and so i can't fall out of love. But we probably have different definitions of love. Remember, it's hard to define love. But someday, somehow, somewhere, hopefully, I will find someone who loves me the same way I love him.