Love

Thinking about the meaning of love. As one does at 5 AM, ignoring the need to get 8 hours of sleep before work on a random Monday. Love, as both the noun and the verb. The love we mean when we say “I love you”. Is it the same as when we say we love a thing? How does the word love conform as we label different aspects of our life with it? Will answering these questions help me understand the dynamics of people who have conceived children and people with pets having countless debates about the love they have for the ones who they call their children.

I want to admit now that I still do not have the answers to these questions. Hopefully as we progress through this writing, we’ll learn something which will at least point us in the right direction for possible future discussion. My goal here is to just get a better understanding myself.

For now, I have the following:

Love is more than a feeling. It’s a path we are continuously choosing to be in. If we think of life as us going through time, choosing paths at crossroads that never end. When we say the phrase “I love you”, what we are doing is we are promising that we’ll always choose the one that leads to the one we’re saying it to. A selfless love would be where we’d always choose the one maximizing their happiness. This means sometimes making decisions or choosing a path that may not look good to them at that moment. When that happens we should apologize for hurting them first, then once they are comfortable, try to come to an agreement on how to move past it. The right thing to do is not the one either you or your other was thinking before realizing your chosen paths were different. The right thing to do would be to come to a collaborative path you can both go through together. Because if either one of you are hesitant, it starts poisoning the “love” you have for each other. With resentment, with pride, with jealousy, and eventually with hatred. If this was the path you thought were the best, find the next best one and compare. If that’s not the same either, find the next and go on until you find one you’ve both ranked the same.