Love
Thinking about what she likes, when you buy food to make dinner, no matter what you would prefer. Imagining her reaction for everything you do when you are not with her. Working your ass off so you both can be comfortable. Wanting to make children together, and bring them up together. Always being on the same team, no matter how pissed off you are at her. Getting her back, as she gets yours.
Taking two years to decide what carpet to buy. Staying with her even when you feel disconnected, believing that, somehow, you’ll get that feeling again. Lighting up when she smiles. Getting that warm wiggle in your tummy when she looks happy. Knowing that both of you think there is no sacrifice too big to make the other one feel good.
Putting up with her mother, her sisters, and her sister’s husbands without throwing your drink in their faces. Watching chick flicks. Not watching football all day on both Saturday and Sunday. Lying next to her rubbing her shoulders even though you’d much rather be fluthering. Urging her, for the thousandth time, to take care of herself, to think she’s worth taking care of, and to not feel like everything has to be so perfect.
Riding your bike for miles so you can lose some weight. Using the CPAP machine so she can sleep. Closing the door to the bedroom (which makes it stifling), so she isn’t worrying about the kids wandering in. Turning the thermostat up to 78, even though you are making damp spots appear all over your shirt.
Love is a million things you do with her in mind, because you want her to feel good. Because you never stop thinking about her, somewhere in the back of your mind.
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There is an ongoing debate about the difference between feelings induced by hormones, infatuation and love. What I’m going to talk about is “falling in love.”
When I fell in love (and I’ve done it a number of times), it started with mutual admiration. More than that, mutual interest and appreciation of each other. You find yourself wanting to spend more time with the person. You enjoy their company so much that you try to be with them as much as you can, and when you’re not with them, you think about them.
They seem perfect to you. Everything they say; everything they do; just seems profoundly moving. You can’t imagine ever doing anything without this person. You feel a glow when in their presence. You want to touch them and they want to touch you, and feel you everywhere and press you tight. Because, after a while, you can’t stand being two different people, and you want to merge your bodies into one. Of course, making love is the closest you can get to that.
Before I ever fell in love the first time… and it was reciprocated, I imagined that making love would be a transcendent experience where you not only merged your bodies, but you merged your consciousnesses. You could think the other person’s thoughts.
Lovemaking is the logical result of loving someone (who isn’t already your relative). It’s the only way to express these feelings so the other person has to totally get it. Lovemaking gives you both such a joy. It feels so good, but not just physically—also emotionally.
Building on this, you continue to spend time together. This is where it starts to get tough. Will your good feelings for the other person stand the test of time? Or will you find out more about them and discover they aren’t as perfect as you thought. This is where relationship skills start to become more important. You need to be able to solve problems together (i.e., deal with your fights). You have to be able to feel sure about the other person’s affections. This belief can be challenged by so many things that we see on fluther: flirting, lap dances, other lovers, and more.
If you navigate those shoals without sinking then you can start to believe that your love has legs. Your love deepens because you have experience with the person. You continue to enjoy each other. When you make love, it is such a creative act in a metaphorical sense. It also can be a creative act in reality—creating new life. Making a baby can seem like the perfect expression of love.
In my life, I have found many women who I admire greatly. I could fall in love over and over again, I believe. My life is full with the love of my wife and my children. It is hard for me, emotionally speaking, to understand why there can only be one love at a time. I understand it intellectually, but, right or wrong, I feel like I have enough love for many. It makes me think ‘isn’t life strange?’
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The first part of love is an incredible euphoric high.
The next part of love is like waiting for your SAT scores.
Then it’s like figuring out how to solve Rubik’s cube.
Then it’s like putting on your favorite slippers and sitting before a fire with a glass of sherry in your hand.
Not necessarily in that order.
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At the beginning it’s an obsession and a high like you can’t believe.
Years later, it is something entirely different.
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When you aren’t in it and you don’t see anything on the horizon that looks like it could be it, it’s easy not to believe in love. You know you want that feeling because it makes you high and you feel safe and you feel you belong somewhere, but you don’t have it.
Perhaps, you think, you are unlovable. No. Not possible. Therefore love must be a sham. It must not really exist. Or, perhaps you don’t know what love is.
It’s easy to get cynical about love. It’s easy to say it’s just chemicals (hormones). It’s easy to say that people are kind of fooling themselves—not that they don’t feel what they feel, but because it doesn’t mean what they think it means.
What’s up with love? Love ain’t always so easy. It does take faith. Cynicism doesn’t help. Chances are, love will come. It has for billions of others.
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Love is not exactly anything, as we can see by the definitions above and surely the definitions below, as well. I don’t think there will ever be any agreement about what love is. There might be a pretty vague consensus, but that’s it.
In recognition of that, the first thing I will say about love is that it is an individual thing. Individuals decide whether they love or not. The lover knows if they are a lover. I would say that, depending on age, if you ask whether you are experiencing love, then you are. Love can cover so many situations and so many relationships.
It is a feeling and an emotion, and it can be both a strong, demanding emotion and a calm, supportive emotion. It could feel like a lot of different things, depending on who you are and how you grew up and what your past experiences with love have been.
Love is something that creates uncertainty in many people. They want some guarantee that what they feel is love. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. We are all on our own when deciding if what we feel is love.
Love generally is associated with good feelings about a partner. Sometimes one puts the partner on a pedestal. Sometimes one puts their life ahead of your own. A lot of people think these things are unhealthy. I think there’s more than one way to express your love. Not everyone wants an equal relationship.
Generally, though, there is mutual respect, although that can play out in many ways. There is a desire to face the world as a team. There is a desire to spend time together regularly, although the amount of time can run from all the time to once a year or even longer. Most people want to live together, but that doesn’t mean other arrangements are not love.
Love is felt physically and also expressed physically. There are many forms of physical expression, from prostration (love for a deity) to hugs and kisses and taking care of each other in a myriad of ways (providing shelter, cooking, cleaning, and everything people do to serve each other). Perhaps the most thought of form of physical love is sex.
Sex fits with love in so many ways. The feelings of sex can be as high as the feelings of falling in love. Sex is a creative act in many ways. One way is in how you make love. How you express your feelings by being sensitive to what makes your partner feel good. But perhaps the most significant way is procreation. Sex, for most people, contains the possibility of creating a new life—the ultimate creative act for humans.
There are many typologies of love, and I’m not going to go over them here. They give these different types of love names. I don’t find it a very useful way to think about love. I tend to think about love more holistically.
The last thing I want to say here is that love is a spiritual thing. What do I mean by that? Well, for me, spirituality is about getting outside your own head and connecting with others—sometimes physically, and sometimes perceptually, and sometimes indescribably. Most often indescribably.
Sex initially creates the physical manifestation of being connected spiritually with someone else. Not all sexual acts, however, are aimed at that spiritual connection. Some people believe sex can just be a good feeling. But for a large number of people—most people, I hope—sex manifests the spiritual connection as symbolized by the physical connection. In some cases, people can not tell where they end and the other person begins when they make love.
Making love can also get you in touch with the larger reality. It can feel like you are connected to all the people and all the things on the planet and in space. Somehow, you know that we are all part of a whole which means we are not really separate from anyone or anything. Whatever that implies.
I’ve talked about a few things, but by no means all the different kinds of things that are love. i don’t think love is magic. It’s made of concrete things and concrete relationships. It does, however, also have amazing mental and emotional effects that can put people on top of the world. Everything that all the songs say. Dancing on sunshine. A many-splendored thing.
For me, personally, the experience of love is what I live for and what keeps me alive. Without the love of a number of people, I would probably be dead by now. I am blessed by love. Many of us are. Perhaps most of us are. Even those who don’t believe in it may experience it. It doesn’t matter what I say or what anyone says. Love is an experience that everyone interprets for themselves. But no matter what people conclude, love still makes the world go ‘round.
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