John Lennon once wrote in his amazing song Love which appears on his
album Plastic Ono Band that -
Love is real, real is love
Love is feeling, feeling love
Love is wanting to be loved
Love is touch, touch is love
Love is reaching, reaching love
Love is asking to be loved
Love is you
You and me
Love is knowing
We can be
Love is free, free is love
Love is living, living love
Love is needing to be loved
That really captures it for me. It's complex and yet it isn't.
Now who is an expert at love? Maybe couples married for 20 or 30 or 40 years
might tell you they've got it just about right. Certainly, they have years
experience in making love (not just the sexual kind either). They've survived
the up and downs, the in and outs, the hot and cold of a relationship. A
relationship founded on making love; of knowing they can be. If you ask them to
define love, I suspect, you'll hear myriad definitions many of which are
captured in the lyrics above.
Other people, usually the young or people who just never grew up, define it with
a simpler demeanor. It's having fun. It's laughing. It's sex. And it's
transitional.
How many times have these people been torn between two lovers and feeling like a
fool to steal a phrase from a Mary McGregor song. It's the grass is always
greener syndrome. It's immediate need gratification. Dump one relationship, jump
immediately into another, and resume having fun, laughing and sex.
Here's a thought: if your eyes wander and heart wonders so easily then you're
not in love as much as may want to believe it. You may want to consider
redefining what love is. If they were the right one then your affections would
concentrate themselves within them impervious to the bent of another's
inclinations. Instead, that material sounds more like "just friends", a phrase
guys hate, then anything substantial. It isn't love; that's being selfish.
Selfish? No. I don't think that's the right word. Shallow? Yes, that's a better
word. We all have our preferences, of course. Certain traits enamor our
passions, but specific qualities tether our emotions. I have an affection for
dark hair framing soft skin brightened by green eyes. Those traits focus my
attention every time. At least for a moment. The qualities a person maintains
keeps that attention. Quality does not not have a hair color. Some people need
to wipe their eyes and look deeper.
One definition you probably will not hear from experienced lovers is that love
is gazing into each others eyes. I hear that one a lot from young people. "We
just lay there staring at each other for hours at a time. I love him" (or her).
Let's look on the board. Survey says....ehhhh... it's not up there.
Love is not gazing into each others eyes. Gazing into each others eyes is the
blurring of the edges of reality. It's hypnotic. It's mesmerizing. It's selfish.
It's the denial of everything surrounding you. During these moment the world is
full of happy chocolate but it's a false impression as it's not the world you
see.
Gazing into each others eyes is also momentary like the sound of your favorite
song. The dynamic value of it, that feeling you have the first and second and
third time you hear it, fades over time into retrospect. You remember the first
time you heard it. You enjoy the memory of past moments but that initial
feeling, that feeling that made you jump up and down and turn the volume up is
replaced by a respect for those moments. It diminishes rather than grows.
Love is founded in the good times and proven in the bad.
Is it love to travel , and dance, and be intimate, and laugh? Sure, yes, that is
part of it. Though it is also love, perhaps even stronger for its selflessness,
to feed your other chicken soup when they are sick, to sit at a hospital bed
when they are weakest, to listen when they are sad, and understand when they are
angry.
It is also love to argue. To know you can argue. To express the most intimate
vulnerabilities knowing the other person will listen, understand, help and keep
them a shared secret. Also, to express dissatisfaction with the other that too
is love. Stirred into the best of us is the worst of us: our foibles, our
failings, our insecurities. These things you also must know before it is love.
These things you can speak of when it is love.
Love is not gazing into each others eyes. It is turning to face the future
together. To travel the same path. To share the same life today, tomorrow, and
next and the next. To experience the best and the worst of each other yet see
yourselves sitting on a bench holding hands while you feed squirrels in the park
at 65.
Here's an easy test. List three things you don't like about the person you love.
Can you do it? If so, then just maybe, it is the foundation of love.
19 January 2004