Happily Ever After

So we all fall in love. We fall in love with people, with animals, with objects, with dreams. We fall in love with ideas, our ideas about things.

Riddle me this: if I fell in love with a person I barely knew, what would I be loving? A romantic would call it “love at first sight”. A cynic would call it obsession. I’d call it bad goddamn luck, because it’s happened and it sucked and (in the end) it turned out that I was in love with the notion of a new life. A refraction of reality.

So if we take as fact the concept that we can fall in love with refractions, let’s examine the concept of love itself. When we love something, someONE, what are we loving? Of course, we’d like to think that we’re loving their “essence”, their “being”. But personality is mutable, minds can be lost, looks fade and ambitions die. So what is left for us to hold onto? What is left to cherish till death do us part? We fall in love with our idea of someone, we fall in love with a reflection of our own ambition, a different perspective of our own mind. And when that idea that we loved is no longer congruent with reality, staying together is something else entirely.

Just thoughts, thinking. You know.

2 responses to “Happily Ever After”

  1. thatkidyoudid Avatar

    Like most people i have experienced a number of different kinds of love: the breathless first love (thanks to erinire, of course), the deranged, obsessive love, thanks to a girl in high school that was just too polite to tell me to leave her the hell alone. There was love that unexpectedly grew from a purely sexual college relationship into my longest committed relationship at the time. There was even love that kept me with someone long after it was over, because i still cared too much to hurt her (strongly not recommended, btw).
    But the love that has stuck really has less to do with who or what my wife is, but with what it is that she brings out in me; what we are together is so much more than the sum of our parts.
    I know that feelings and people change over time, but the interaction of two people (chemistry for the cliche) is the most important aspect of the most lasting love.

    Like

  2. It does become something else entirely. that’s the scary part. But when those two people learn and grow together from that something else, well, that is the beautiful part. That is the “love” part of the equation.

    Like

Leave a comment

Blog at WordPress.com.