What Kind Of Love Are You On?

I have been accused of hating love and not understanding other people’s notions of love. Perhaps it is indeed true that I do not understand other people’s notions of this profoundly perplexing human emotion and their expectations of it. However, I am certain that I do not ‘hate’ love. How can I, when I fall in love with so many things around me almost a hundred times each day?

When I watch the sky at different points of the day, I feel gladdened to see it in all its unwavering beauty. There is always some aspect that draws my soul towards it and makes me love gazing at it for endless hours, staring intently at the ephemeral clouds, the graceful birds and the innumerable shades of colour that I see. Aye, I do call it love, for it is what I feel: boundless joy at being one with the world around me, just like the boundless sky.

I love music. I love art. I love good literature. I love the fact that the human mind is equipped with creative energies capable of giving rise to such monuments, such tributes to intelligence and thought, such testaments to the freedom of creating such ethereal forms of self-expression. It gives me so much joy that I feel inspired, motivated and driven to do the same and live up to myself and all that I am capable of.

I could go on endlessly about all the little things that I fall in love with everyday. Yes, the feeling is love, for I feel happiness, hope, despair, fear, grief, anguish, ecstasy and pain all at the same time. It is intense enough to overwhelm me and leave me gasping for breath, yet I enjoy every moment of it, even the pain of feeling stifled or choked by its power … and its beauty.

However, I may be asked why I have left human interactions out of this proclamation of mine. Why have I not mentioned any people? What are my views on ‘relationships’ between people? In a word: ‘confusing’. For instance, I find people speaking of certain ‘standards’ that they have, standards that they have set for themselves with no pressure from other people, however these standards are hardly, if ever maintained. You say that you believe in something, but your actions state otherwise. You say that you have set certain ethical boundaries for yourself, yet you do not hesitate to cross them the moment you find them uncomfortable, testing or difficult to live by. You say that you love, but you don’t truly mean it. For you it is just another word … a bit of ‘fun’, nothing more. I do not understand this at all.

Without wishing to sound judgemental, I must mention that I find behaviour of this kind incomprehensible since it is something that I personally would not do. Although I have learnt that it is unrealistic to assume that people are truly what they present themselves to be, I find this deception bewildering. What is wrong or quite so difficult about being truthful about yourself? Why would you say something if you didn’t actually mean it? What kind of satisfaction does one get from lying when it is certain that the façade put up by lies is sure to crumble one day? I find no rational answers to these questions of mine.

Considering a different angle, this entire concept of ‘declaring’ how much you love a person to the whole world, indulging in what I often call ‘mushy-ness’, going to great lengths to show other people how much you care by stating that you would die for a person, is something that I find odd and also somewhat illogical. I find it odd since I don’t understand why one would want to let oneself be quite so vulnerable to the world at large, leaving one at the mercy of a world that is simply waiting to steal something away. I am a very private person and I find it unfathomable why someone would want everyone to know of something quite so personal and make such public displays of ‘sappy’ behaviour. The logical part of me asks how one can know for certain that the relationship will actually last long enough to be boasted about to all and sundry. I have seen people constantly talk about their love-lives only to have their relationships end after a week or a month.

I have nothing against love itself neither do I judge people who are in love by categorising them as ‘bad’, ‘wrong’ or some other adjective. It must be nice to be able to open up to that extent to someone else. It’s just that I am sceptical about it as people often don’t mean what they say (and are sometimes unaware of the fact that they don’t). Life isn’t all about fairy-tale endings, neither is it a replication of a clichéd romantic comedy. Speaking from a practical point of view, I must say that looking at life through rose-tinted glasses will only result in one’s vision being flawed. While I understand that it is only human instinct acting when people feel ‘attracted’ to each other, I think that it would be foolish and illogical to assume that any sort of relationship can be based on lust alone.

At the risk of sounding didactic, I’ll venture this: at the end of the road it is all about companionship. Lust and attraction do indeed fade after some time just like the hormone levels of humans tend to fluctuate. However if you’re comfortable in the presence of the person whom you profess to love, and find his or her company soothing and calming even in times of distress, then, I feel that it’s a relationship that has the potential to last, provided that both parties involved are willing to work at maintaining it. Call me foolish and idealistic, but I think that love should be long-term if it is to be worth all the effort. In the end it’s about being with a person whom you can sit next to or lie with ‘and just forget the world’.