The "L" Word

A lot of people think I'm strange for reading as much as I do but there's a reason that I do. I learn so much from every book that I pick up. Not only is my experience of life colored by those I interact with, but also by the books that I read and the lives I experience through them. In fact, it's through this last book I read that I began think about what exactly I know about "love". The character in the book was in love with someone who didn't love her back, hilarious. At first this situation was too close for comfort but the ending to the situation got me thinking. Yes, they eventually got together and lived happily ever after (it was a romance novel, so of course) but the character also realized that when they had been together before, their relationship wasn't ready for love. Isn't it strange how there can actually be a wrong time for love? I mean, it's what all the poets talk about, it's what most of us spend a lot of time looking for and then when it plops right into your lap you can actually say "I'm not ready for this, come back later".

I think that my views on the "L" word may be a little different than other's. It may come from my tendency to leap before I look or to think myself in circles, but I have no problem with throwing my heart out there to be broken. Now you could say to me that I've never really had my heart broken and I'd tell you that you're full of shit. I will admit that I've never had my heart shattered into a thousand pieces but yes it has been cracked in its own right. All I know is that it's easy for me to love those around me, unconditionally and without fear. I hope that they will love me in return, but sometimes I feel so strongly for the ones I love that I think I love them enough for both of us.

Now the age old question, what is love to begin with? How do you know you love someone and even more, how do you know when you're in love with someone? I wish I knew for sure but not knowing doesn't cause me to question how I feel. If I had to put it into a definition, it would be when you go more than a day without someone and you miss them like crazy, when just thinking about living life without them makes you want to bawl or when you're lying next to someone and it's the only place you want to be. It's so hard to untangle love from friendship or just being close to someone. Where does one stop and the other begin? I don't think they can be separated, they belong together. It's being able to sit in comfortable silence or saying things at the exact same time that makes relationships awesome.

I was just thinking that one way to know how much to love someone is to realize how much they can hurt you. I read somewhere (big surprise) that your capacity to love someone is your capacity to hate them. I know how badly my loved ones could hurt me if they were cruel to me or cut me out of their lives and I can only imagine how that would make me feel. It's only really recently that I've known what's it like to actually feel your heart breaking, to physically feel a dull ache in your chest because you hurt so badly. That is how deeply I can love that person.

One thing I have learned is that sometimes love isn't forever. People grow up and grow apart, it happens all the time. You learn something from every relationship and you take those lessons on to new relationships to hopefully avoid the mistakes you made in the past. But just because you fall out of love with someone doesn't mean you didn't love them to begin with. I know in my heart that it is possible to no longer feel the same way about someone. Yes, you still love them in some way because they had a special place in your heart but sometimes it's wiser to move on and find love again.

My conclusions? Love is hard but so is life, get used to it. If you're having a difficult time in a relationship, trust that you will not die and do what you need to do. Throw caution to the wind and take a chance, I did. Although I got a lot of heartache in return, I believe that I'm stronger now and a better person for it. Fate has a funny habit of getting it's way and who are you to try to stop it? That's also something I've figured out. I was running around trying to bend things to my liking but it's so much nicer just to take a breath and realize that everything will work out like it is supposed to, just go with the flow. These are the lessons that I've learned. Maybe they're wrong, I don't know, but they work right now and learning the lesson is the best part for me. When I'm in the middle of it, life sucks, but afterwards I can smile because I'm that much wiser now.