Love is a sweat relation between persons. Many abbreviations are there for this.
True love is when you find someone who can laugh at the absurdity of life with you, who you can be happy with sitting in silence for 24 hours straight, whether you are looking at them behind a glass wall, on a skype screen on the other side of the world, or lying still in their arms. True love is being with someone who reminds you growing up doesn't mean that you can't be a kid always. True love is when the happiness you feel for your own accomplishments is dwarfed by the happiness you feel when the person you love is smiling. True love is finding someone who annoys you less than they make you feel safe, wanted, and at peace with the world's overall lack of meaning -- and even being with someone who gives the world a little bit of powerful temporary meaning.
What is not love?
I think to understand what love is requires us to first understand what love is not.
Society’s vocabulary for love and its ancillary concepts is exceedingly limited. When two teenagers meet after curfew at a dark, secluded area and embrace each other tightly, we call it ‘love’. When an old married couple, on the day of their 47th wedding anniversary, strolls along a river and smiles at each other, all the while tenderly holding on to one another’s hand, we call that ‘love’ as well. We may add a few adjectives before ‘love’ such as ‘young love’, ‘matured love’ or other words that may extend, restrict, delineate or describe the scope of romantic love, but we rarely pay attention to the things that masquerade as ‘love’, such as infatuation or loneliness. Although everyone holds in their heads an idea of love which represents a fragment of the whole, no one really knows what it entirely is about.
Infatuation
I think this hazy understanding of love is why we often confuse infatuation i.e. intense emotional attraction, or what psychologist Dorothy Tennov calls ‘limerence’, with the idealised, abstract notion of love that we would like to have and experience.
“Was I correct to detect traces of flirtation at the ends of her sentences and the corners of her smiles, or was this merely my own desire projected onto the face of innocence?”
When you meet someone with whom you feel some kind of strong romantic possibility, you start unlocking the secret chambers of your heart and letting her into these vulnerable rooms of your being. All of a sudden, the spaces between both of you no longer feel meaningless: the air grows thick and heavy with resistance, as though charged with chemicals that leave phosphorescent trails in the air as your hand moves closer to hers – chemicals that are just waiting to be ignited upon contact. Your mind becomes hyper-aware of the distances between the two of you, capable even of calculating exactly how far away she is from you despite having only slight or periphery vision. Because you have no idea what her opinion of you is, her every gesture – and sometimes, even the absence of gestures – becomes imbued with maddening significance. “Was I correct to detect traces of flirtation at the ends of her sentences and the corners of her smiles, or was this merely my own desire projected onto the face of innocence?”
Loneliness
The same might be said of loneliness. It is said that “[n]ew couples take the intensity of their early infatuation with one another for proof of the intensity of their love even while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness”
This happens more frequently than one might imagine. After all, no other epouch in history has seen an individual more aware of the highlight reels of others’ contemporaneous lives than the one we are living in today, where Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp conspire to show us how lonely we are compared to others. Given that many people – both youths and adults – have such difficulty appreciating solitude and differentiating it from loneliness, it is perhaps no wonder that individuals resort to love to fill the gaping voids within.
"Love is like pi natural, irrational and very important."
True love is when you find someone who can laugh at the absurdity of life with you, who you can be happy with sitting in silence for 24 hours straight, whether you are looking at them behind a glass wall, on a skype screen on the other side of the world, or lying still in their arms. True love is being with someone who reminds you growing up doesn't mean that you can't be a kid always. True love is when the happiness you feel for your own accomplishments is dwarfed by the happiness you feel when the person you love is smiling. True love is finding someone who annoys you less than they make you feel safe, wanted, and at peace with the world's overall lack of meaning -- and even being with someone who gives the world a little bit of powerful temporary meaning.
What is not love?
I think to understand what love is requires us to first understand what love is not.
Society’s vocabulary for love and its ancillary concepts is exceedingly limited. When two teenagers meet after curfew at a dark, secluded area and embrace each other tightly, we call it ‘love’. When an old married couple, on the day of their 47th wedding anniversary, strolls along a river and smiles at each other, all the while tenderly holding on to one another’s hand, we call that ‘love’ as well. We may add a few adjectives before ‘love’ such as ‘young love’, ‘matured love’ or other words that may extend, restrict, delineate or describe the scope of romantic love, but we rarely pay attention to the things that masquerade as ‘love’, such as infatuation or loneliness. Although everyone holds in their heads an idea of love which represents a fragment of the whole, no one really knows what it entirely is about.
Infatuation
I think this hazy understanding of love is why we often confuse infatuation i.e. intense emotional attraction, or what psychologist Dorothy Tennov calls ‘limerence’, with the idealised, abstract notion of love that we would like to have and experience.
“Was I correct to detect traces of flirtation at the ends of her sentences and the corners of her smiles, or was this merely my own desire projected onto the face of innocence?”
When you meet someone with whom you feel some kind of strong romantic possibility, you start unlocking the secret chambers of your heart and letting her into these vulnerable rooms of your being. All of a sudden, the spaces between both of you no longer feel meaningless: the air grows thick and heavy with resistance, as though charged with chemicals that leave phosphorescent trails in the air as your hand moves closer to hers – chemicals that are just waiting to be ignited upon contact. Your mind becomes hyper-aware of the distances between the two of you, capable even of calculating exactly how far away she is from you despite having only slight or periphery vision. Because you have no idea what her opinion of you is, her every gesture – and sometimes, even the absence of gestures – becomes imbued with maddening significance. “Was I correct to detect traces of flirtation at the ends of her sentences and the corners of her smiles, or was this merely my own desire projected onto the face of innocence?”
Loneliness
“New couples take the intensity of their early infatuation with one another for proof of the intensity of their love even while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness”
The same might be said of loneliness. It is said that “[n]ew couples take the intensity of their early infatuation with one another for proof of the intensity of their love even while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness”
This happens more frequently than one might imagine. After all, no other epouch in history has seen an individual more aware of the highlight reels of others’ contemporaneous lives than the one we are living in today, where Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp conspire to show us how lonely we are compared to others. Given that many people – both youths and adults – have such difficulty appreciating solitude and differentiating it from loneliness, it is perhaps no wonder that individuals resort to love to fill the gaping voids within.
"Love is like pi natural, irrational and very important."
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