Love is a wonderful thing.
Or so everyone says at least. Even though a lot of them would also say love tears you apart. I've been thinking a lot about the concept of love and what it means to different people. And the truth is basically that the concept of "love" is different in each of our brains based on the way our parents loved (or didn't love) us. And although that can be a good thing if a child felt really loved by their parents, I don't really know of anyone who didn't inherit some kind of emotional damage from the way they were raised. Even with people whose parents are great. Everyone feels let down, neglected, or damaged in some way or another by their parents.
So just think about that for a minute. Our idea of what "love" is, is bred into us, passed down by our parents in the way they raise and care for us, and our hormones and biological desire to reproduce combine and seek something to represent this concept of "love" in reality. We find an object for that desire when boy meets girl.
And this desire for the perfect love, the idealisation of what all of us interpret as love, becomes a goal. Sex, marriage, co-dependency, fear of lonliness, and emotional attachment all drive us to pair and try to stay paired. For some this is easier than others.
Love is just basically passed down to us like that. With all our parents' warped ideas of love from the damage they inherited from their parents. So love is like, almost a disease, some kind of hereditary infection.
But at the same time, it really fucking is the best thing in the world, isn't it? I mean if I'm being totally honest right now, it's the only thing I truly desire. It's something I want in my life so bad that sometimes I ignore red flags about people. Or I assume it'll end soon anyway and go forward thinking I won't get my heart broken, but love takes over and once again I fall and get hurt and come crashing back down to earth.
It's terrible, really! Love is fucking brutal. But even the most cynical among us still wants and hopes for it. I mean wouldn't you just give anything for a perfect, passionate night with the one you love. Those rare perfect nights that scatter the timeline of your life and you just know you'll never forget them. Because you were high as a kite on the best drug in the world. Feeling perfect. Feeling alive. Feeling human, god, and beast at the same time. Endorphines lifting you to a new kind of heaven.
If love is a sickness (and I'm pretty sure it is), I'll still take it over hiding from it, or being afraid of it. Well we're all afraid but I'd rather love boldly and suffer deeply than to not be able to feel. I'd risk it all again for those highs.
And this is why I want to work on myself. Because I want to learn as much about myself and my damage and my own personal idea of love as I can so that when I meet a great man who also is getting to know himself, maybe it can be fucking great and stay great next time. Because if we never stop working on ourselves, we can really learn a lot and make this life so much easier for ourselves and the ones we love.
Somehow love, or the hope of love, makes it all worth it. This world has a lot of troubles to offer, but it also has a unique and beautiful gift to give. And that's love.