Ten separate thoughts on love / looking for it
1. Love has never been totally, accurately, universally categorised. I feel like whatever my greatest remembered sensation of love has been, there could be a stronger version of it, more intense, more clear, more present, more total, more all-consuming.
2. Love that exists totally at a distance from another person is ‘just’ crushing. This can be intense, powerful, all the things that also are a feature of love. But it is not ‘love’. An interaction, a relation between two beings, an expression and reciprocation of whatever it is that love is – that is love.
3. Love is like sex. Love is not sex. Sex is not love.
4. It isn’t possible to say ‘truthfully’ when feelings for someone are love. But it is impossible to be in love and not know it – if there is a possibility for you to say ‘this is not love’, then ‘this’ is not love.
5. That what you have is love is a reason for anything, but not a jutification. Love, the possibility of love, the search for love, is the ultimate excuse to do anything, absolutely anything. Nothing can ever be excused, absolved, made acceptable, because of love. Love will not pull you from the grave you dig for Her.
6. There are no good statistics with reliable answers for love. It may happen, it may come to you. It may not. You may find love, but it may not stay forever. You may love before you die, but you may also not die in love. If you go to the end having loved, then congratulations – you have won something.
7. Love can make anything better, and can make anything worse.
8. Love is real. It is a thing. You cannot buy it, you cannot train for it, you cannot ‘achieve’ it. But it is real.
9. Love is something that is believed in. Other facts about the world can at best, not contradict the existence of love. When you have never loved, you have to force yourself to believe in this thing that you’ve never seen. When you are in love, you will only come to be sure that you are in love through the act of loving another, through feeling love. When you are in love, and do not have the reinforcement of that ‘loving’ sensation, you will question whether yo were ever in love, and have no way to answer. When you are out of love, you will only have the memory of love, and will have to remember that there was a time, once, when you knew, simply knew, that there was such a thing.
10. Love is the greatest thing that you will ever find in a bookstore, a supermarket, at college, in a conversation, in bed, in the street, over coffee, over dinner, at the top of the Eiffel Tower, under the watch of the Hollywood sign, in the moment when it seems that things are at their worst, in the moment when it seems that things could never be better than this. Never stop looking.
