Originally posted by Melancholia
why don't you post your thoughts on love instead of being rude -
-??
since i've been asked with such kindness...
love. where do we start? from the end.
when love ends, one tends to look at it with hindsight, which is a slightly more lucid context than when you're knee-deep in it or you see it as a fast-approaching train. looking back to how you felt, you see it without too many flowery alibis and possibly realize it was a deep-rooted feeling, summoned in you by a number of reasons. so: the emotion, its causes.
i don't think there's any way to set a standard as to
what are universal reasons for falling in love with someone: there's ppl who finds love (the emotion) in itself for motives that might mean nothing to everybody else,
and such reasons might differ in time so that what kickstarts you when you're 18 just has no effect anymore when you get 25,
and there is seldom a perfect rational grasp over how
personal such motives might be, or how much it's really us creating the aura of need and sainthood around the would-be partner.
there might be more or less generic guidelines: one usually
doesn't fall in love with ppl he/she finds rude, ugly, passive, uninteresting and anything despicable. but even that is known to happen from time to time.
so at the end of the day i don't think there's any viable definition of the feeling-formerly-known-as-love, apart from the one the two lovers agree upon. there are ways to express what one feels that go way beyond 'i love you', which is often quite an empty formula. as long as two ppl know what they're talking about, i feel the content can be as varied as anything.
as to how much love matters and the differences between brotherly/friendly/family love and the partner-oriented one, i think most of you are happily beating around the bush.
those 'three pieces of the cake' are just not the same thing. i love my friends a lot, and i think that at the moment my deepest loving feelings go out to 3-4 of my friends. this means i'd give my life for them, i actually feel very strong emotions when we are happy together, and i feel pretty bad when something's wrong between us. this, nonetheless, has nothing at all to do with any kind of exclusive, living-our-lives-together, let's-devote-our-existence-to-each-other structure i would just like to feel for
one girl (at a time, at least
). same goes for my family.
can i live without being with an unfortunate human being we will euphemistically call 'my soulmate'? sure. as |ngenius pointed out, there's tons of things we could live without. however, it seems that most ppl find exclusive love as one of the basic aspects of their lives. why?
because our emotions stem from the place we live in. human society is founded on ppl getting together and raising a family, like it or not. one can't just spend his/her whole life watching families (or at least couples) sprouting out everywhere without
feeling this is something inherently good. and you know what? i second this thought: chasing supposed soulmates and getting married and having babies and getting along through the many pitfalls of human life with your significant other is a very good thing and it certainly makes your life more complete, if not absolutely complete. so i encourage everyone here to drop the anti-everything pose and allow themselves to feel something unique, at least for a while. then i promise we'll all get back to being a bunch of dark-minded knights of doom devoting their lives to turn their broad and stolid backs to such a tricky and disappointing aspect or reality.
rahvin. (grinding his teeth all the time)
I like vandalising things with lipstick.
