What love is

I think one of the simplest and best ways to look at it is: do you care more about what is good for them than what is good for you?

it's always easy for somebody to fall in love with somebody. Falling in love with somebody is the easy part. Now getting somebody who you love to fall in love with you is the hard part.

The amount of people who love somebody way out-numbers the amount of people who are in a relationship where there are two people in love with each other.

Sadly, at thirteen or seventeen or twenty three, I would have said yes, yes, "I will good for the other more than myself"

But not now.
Poppycock, as Lord Ellpus might say.


What is it love might be?

I've felt for a good twenty years now that we can love whom we choose to love, within the range of those who are not patently offensive to us. The ancients of the classical world (i.e., in the West) often considered love to be a minor mental health problem, easily cured through aging and maturity. However, in considering this, and my own life's experience, i came to the conclusion that such an attitude is only the result of the imposition of a cultural value. I am unable to demonstrate emotion--so, to that extent, my line of reasoning is simple speculation about the unknown. But i became and remain convinced that one can choose whom one will love from among a wide range of persons.

Therefore, the "trick" is to find someone for whom one will not loose respect, and from whom one can reasonably anticipate respect in return. Then, one must treat this other with a genuine justice--to treat him or her as one would be treated; and to make the best, most honest effort of which one is capable to "see" the person as they are, and to "see" oneself as one is, to avoid the pitfall of having a sense of justice which conveniently coincides with one's desires.

Finally, one needs patience--a patience essential to accomplish the compassion, the understanding, the justice which is at least the due of those whom we would say we love. Patience to get to know our chosen partner, and so develop the respect, without which no such relationship is possible. And finally, the patience to await the growth and maturity of the genuine love for that other, which i am convinced will arise from such a process.

Yes, Set. I agree.

How hard then this is to convey to someone thirteen.

I do remember a certain betwixtness on my part when a young md I thought I just might like possibly maybe perhaps, said to me, that one could love anyone, it was a matter of will. And he wasn't the first bright man to say that to me. Hmm, other women are on pedestals, and to me they say, I could love anyone...

And I demurred in my mind, being as I was at the time keen on meeting a soulmate.

He ended up loving a patient, who probably had some not so good medical development. He was pretty wonderful as a person, in fact did magic tricks rather too much. (I hope they are still happy, even now.)

I picked some good guys, I gotta say, and they me. I'll glide over the misbegottens on their and my parts for the nonce.

I did look up an old flame on google recently, not only old flame but first lover - have done that before but not nabbed him. This time I did and I'd love to trumpet it to a2kers as damn, he grew up fine. Turned out to do key explorations and write well thought of books, which is not a complete surprise to me - y'know, I did love his mind and bod as well as his heart.. Those sound as easy words to me now, but my love then was simply immeasureable.

Time passes.

He is still married to the woman he met just after me, and that's near forty years now, and more power to her, she is a woman I'd like aside from her association with him.
Finding this out, that his books/explorations are so well regarded, was good for me to read, recently - a bit of full circle.
I was not the right woman for him, it wouldn't have worked.
His now wife was and is now the right woman.

I could have died from pain when we broke up.
But instead a little bit of our nineteen year old selves, or 21 in my case, became part of who we are now.

So how do we speak of patience to someone thirteen...

Maybe you simply can't hear all the advice about patience, waiting, other fish in the sea, when you're a teenager because you just don't have the perspective. It's like being the first human being to see the sun go down-- how do you know it will ever come back up until you've seen it for yourself?

Much as we'd like to say to the young kids-- even I feel like playing the wise woman for some of these kids, though i'm probably only ten years older than most of them-- who post on here about their "true love", just wait, with time you'll find out what love really is, in all its unglamourous reality-- there really is no way to tell someone so that they believe it. At thirteen or fifteen or whenever, you never imagine that something that seems so strong and powerful could just change. You just don't understand until you feel it for yourself, how that infatuation that seemed so real can fade away-- or it can go through that awful period when everything about the person you love seems obnoxious and trying, when before it all seemed so perfect and endearing, and then either moves beyond that stage and matures into acceptance of their flaws, or just doesn't survive.

I think, whatever love is, you can't explain all those facets and strangenesses to someone who hasn't gone through it yet; and you can't explain how much time, and waiting for it to happen, is a part of love. Hard for us to accept, but maybe there's no way to help people avoid all the pitfalls and mistakes-- maybe you need to go through them to see them.

DOC
Why, when I was your age-

ACTION
When you was my age; when my old man was my age; when my brother
was my age! You was never my age, none a you! The sooner you
creeps get hip to that, the sooner you'll dig us.

West Side Story (I,6)

I agree completely.

I think when you're young though, you think love is that warm fuzzy feeling in your stomach, which is really just physical lust. It feels like something magical, and you have never felt anything so good before, and you've seen what it looks like on the movie screen and maybe in books, and you think, "I'm in love", when really it's just boink fever.

So when giving advice to some young person about love, you have to remember that when they tell you they are in love, they aren't even speaking the same language, really. I don't even think you can convey what real love is to someone who is very young. It's something that must be learned, and when I say "learned", I'm not talking about intellectual learning. I'm talking about the kind of learning that only happens through experience.

I have a new perspective on love....

The other day, the new object of my affection peed on me.

Yep, I picked her up to say goodbye and she responded by peeing on my work clothes-- just as I was about to leave.

It occurred to me that had anyone peed on me even three months ago, I would have been quite upset. This time I just laughed and enjoyed the amazing fortune of each moment with her I am blessed with.

I don't know what that means, but I feel 17 again...

I agree, Kicky, and I delight in how your love your baby, ebrown.

I've thought for quite a while now that love is a process, a renewing process... that can fall apart if both lovers don't function together much in the way Setanta described so well earlier.

Sorry, Dora, that I waved off your comment on willing good for the other person more than yourself. That really can be part of it, but I don't think that is all of it like I used to.

I agree, Osso, there is more to it. But I think what Dora said is the center of it. "Loving" is more than simple "wanting."

Lust, or what Kicky described so well as "boink fever," is often mistaken for love. But it's not the only thing. There's infatuation, too. It's not purely lust...it's idolization, it's adoration, it's obsession. It's just the first stage of real love, though. Sometimes it doesn't progress, but when it does...oh wow.

I feel sorry for people who don't know the difference between infatuation and real love, and throw away everything when the idolization ends.

When Classical Greece spoke of love as a "divine madness" they seem to have been referring to infatuation and lust. Love is, I think, a form of deep appreciation, affection, and attraction. The attraction is to the entire person, his/her personality, character and look (notice, I didn't say "looks"; that could be important but not essential).

I am not so confident as you, Eva, that selfless willing good for the other is at the heart of love.

No?

When I have loved the most deeply, I have put the other person's good before my own. Their happiness was more important to me than my own, because making them happy was so fulfilling.

Osso--

Self-sacrifice is laudable, but one grows very tired of self-sacrifice. I think the self-sacrificing woman is going to take her place with the corseted woman and the bustled woman and the hoopskirted woman as a passing fad.

"...Youth's a thing 'twill not endure..." Shakespeare was a wise man, and the human race is damn lucky that youth is limited.

The May issue of Atlantic Monthly points out that 100 years ago as many "young" marriages ended in death as now end in divorce.

Restoration Dramatist (can't remember which one):

Why should a foolish marriage vow,
That long ago was made
Bind us to each other now
That passion is decayed.

Love is more than sacrifice, more than passion....and less than either.

I laud the intense selfless feelings, Eva, but they evanesce over time if the loved one doesn't love you back. Evanesce? Evaporate. I think love is a product of the process of both people caring - not every minute of the day or every year of the relationship - and that the caring is done by two people who do have senses of selves (heh, jl, however nondually they might do that).

Feel free to correct me everybody, am still learning on all this.