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Hey TL, this blog is going to be a lot more happy blog, :D. I’d like to begin by stating that I’m not so course or so naïve as to think that what I perceive as love is what another perceives. Yet, part of me is compelled to think that there has to be some similarities in the way a girl or a guy sees another girl or a guy. I guess TL, I want to really ask you all about Love, but not just love the emotion, but how you know you FEEL the emotion how you know when you are In Love.
As a straight male, I am not familiar with homosexual relationships. I know gay people in relationships, but I’ve never personally experienced one. If anyone wants to enlighten me about them in the comments they are more than welcome. I hesitate to say they are exactly the same as straight love since their tends to be a sort of looked-down-upon air that gay people have to deal with. Though for the purposes of not sounding like a complete asshole and show how uncultured I am, I’ll assume all love is similar in most ways.. Also, since I am not a female, this will be mostly from the male precondition.
How Does It Make You Feel?
Love is a cool thing, and an uncool thing. It’s a feeling that you can’t help but acknowledge, but at the same time a lot of people repress their love because they feel its just a fleeting seduction. I want to distinguish here between infatuation and love. From here on in, Love has no definition, neither operational (psychology experiment-esque) nor connotative (dictionary-esque); however, infatuation’s definition will be described and not stated. Infatuation is that chick who is 36-24-36 (the supposed perfect combination) has no brains at all, you know will not work for long, but you want to give it a try. This is going to be my stepping-stone. I don’t care about looks, I care mostly about the above statement, the knowledge that you want to try something, but you know, deep down, it most likely won’t work.
A lot of love begins with infatuation, but changes later to love. Infatuation, at least to me, seems like all the love that fails to mature. Yet, how does that explain divorce where people genuinely fall out of love? The answer is that this definition does not. Maybe one day if I am ever that unfortunate to fall out of love I may understand, but at this point I am clueless.
What Love Is
Love to me begins with the eyes, and ends with the heart. Here is a simple flowchart of what love is.
- You see a girl, you find her attractive
- You court the girl to see if she matches the laundry list of things you want in a girl
- The girl either responds positively or negatively to her suitors, you included
- If you are successful, your relationship begins from the infatuation.
As you can see here, infatuation can be replaced by attraction here, which might be my hamartia in this case. As you can see this is how I perceive the way that love starts. I am not the best source, but from this singularly tangible attraction erupts the intangible love that we know as Love. Love is a chain of attractions that make people never want to separate despite the fact that at our original roots, not monogamous.
What Love Is Not
Love is not, to me at least, an occurrence that is solely one sides. There are compromises to be made on both sides. Here is a simple flow-chart for what I mean.
- Boy meets girl
- Boy outlines what he wants and when he sees she lacks one small detail, stops courting her
That is what I mean by what love isn’t. Love is not just that early infatuation that occurs only when someone has what you want. Love seems to be some intagible force that pulls people together against the odds. I may just be puking rainbows here, but I can’t be completely wrong here.
I wish I could do that…
All You Need is Love
In about 4 months I’ll have my anniversary with my current GF. The feelings I have now are romantic to say the least, and I’m very attracted to her. Some, including myself, would say that I love her; however, others have informed me that true love is not the romantic attraction or the general want to be a team, but rather what happens after you have been a team for a certain amount of time. Now I can’t profess to be a guy that has had his diamond anniversary, but I can profess that I am as naïve as it can possibly get.
As many girl blogs as I have made in the past, I have never truly asked TL about what constitutes love. I’m sure this has been asked in other blogs, but how does TL view love. Is love Love or is it just an emotion that passes. Is there anything that you know of that measures up to love? These are all questions that I have that personally I could never really ask my parents just because, despite the fact they have been happily married for what seems like ever, they got spited by love in earlier relationships. In other words they are jaundiced. My mom is on this “finding love” self help book tear that has made her incredibly jaundiced, and frankly my dad is not the kind of guy to ask about true love since he was also spited in an earlier relationship. I could of course be very wrong and that could be part of true love, not really knowing if your love is unbreakable.
TL;DR – Love isn’t clear to me, all I know is I’m in it, and yet what that means I don’t know. I love my girlfriend in the most sincere way any 17 year old can love, and though it sounds pretentious, I know its true. However, what is older, more “real” love like? With that I leave you TL, make me less naïve.
Cheers, Lee.
 
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Love is waking up to your girlfriend's non-makeup face with her morning dragon breath and giving her a kiss and then getting out of bed to make her breakfast... because you love her.
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however, others have informed me that true love is not the romantic attraction or the general want to be a team, but rather what happens after you have been a team for a certain amount of time
This is true. When you get close to being with your girlfriend for 412 days, your parents will probably have a talk with you on the changes that will happen once you experience true love. Nobody really knows why it happens on day 412, but it does. There have been studies.
Anyway, when I was probably around your age, I put some thought into how I would define love, and what I came up with has actually lasted several years without being changed, so I'm proud of that. As I was growing up, I never believed in any kind of "fate" or destiny or anything like that, but constantly in various forms of media you see love being semi-defined as when two people are just somehow "meant" for each other, and feel as though there's no way anyone else in the world could possibly be more "right" for them. Obviously, this is ridiculous. But I decided that it would be my definition of love as well: if there's ever a girl that can make me throw my senses to the wind and feel as though she is the one girl with the perfect combination of attributes that compliments my own, then I will know that I'm in love.
Strangely, there have been a couple girls that have made me feel this way at various points in my life, and it is glorious.
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chemicals and feeelingssssss
i think as you grow older you will only learn that there are many different types of love, and people.
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ok hazel nut said what i say in way less words. but in case you want the full post to go with the TLdr ill post it
I think Love is something you learn about by trying and failing and hurting. A fire that allows one to "learn and burn" if you will. Love and lust go together well for me.
My definition of love: The ability of the human animal to feel an affection so deeply toward another that the loved one becomes enmeshed into him, causing him to care for her happiness, sometimes even more than for his own.
The type of love with the notable physical qualities is lust. This is not platonic love; it is romantic love which i believe is usually related to sexual feelings, in my experience people who are truly in love feel the affection of lust as well as the love that is supposedly more "pure" and less related to sex, known as platonic. Lust feels really good. In my mind it is like a blissful empathy for others. I can sympathize and not get too down. In my body, it is extra strength and courage. I guess some sweet medley of cocaine esque neuro transmitters. This lust is what the platonic love can grow out of. As Iago says in Shakespeare's Othello love "is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will", meaning you have lust and then you allow it to become deeper if you choose to "will it". If you aaccept, things get wild. "highs are high, lows are lower", jealousy happens, love sickness happens.
I believe love becomes more than lust, as the priest in Hemingway's "Farewell to Arms" says when "one wants to sacrifice" .
classic about love by Blake :
Love to faults is always blind
always is to joy inclined
Lawless, winged and unconfined
and breaks all chains from every mind
says it so perfectly for me. In my interpretation, the first line: "love to faults is always blind" means like you said, If its really love,you don't stop talking to someone for one small flaw.You may see a flaw, but it is all part of her unique character and you fuckin like that! The next line "always is to joy inclined", to me doesn't mean that a person in love is always happy. i think it means that one's mood is generally elevated. Less of the bummers get you down even though you acknowledge them. The third line is the one that really describes it. It is wild and fearless and it does not like anything to get in its way (the person in love kind of takes on the traits of "love itself" one assumes). I have heard love personified as a "wild hog" and "not mild" that it "can't be toilet trained and taught cute tricks". Love is not for one's superficial gain in other words. That kind of thing destroys it. The last line: "breaks all chains from every mind" seems to explain that it breaks people free of hurtful bias. Many harmful feelings are caused by a person's fear to break out of habits and weakness caused by pride and his societies convention.Love gives the strength to break the things that hold them back.
As you said the thought that it is "boy meets girl everything is perfect happily ever after" is what has destroyed love for me and at least one other (the guy from 500 days of summer) I believe this kind of thinking deludes one from "how the real stuff" actually is and confuses me.
To quote loosely something Leonard Cohen wrote in a journal that was quoted in a biography: "i do not think humans are so unique that there exists among the living only one special, perfect lover for each special person to be be pressed and fit together by Fate like jigsaw pieces. Each person we want to love takes us on a different path to love and they change us and we change them and love offers as many alternate paths as any landscape"
wow its pretty hard to tell you everything i've learned. even then you'd need the experience to really understand... ah well. i had fun.
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I've been dating my current girlfriend for a little over 5.5 years (I'm 28 years old), and I'm planning to propose soon as we've finally gotten some clarity in how our futures can become one (she's in med school and I like to travel a lot). We've grown to know each other on such a deep level, despite how insanely different our personalities are (she's ISTJ, i'm ENFP if that makes any sense to you). I think we also never really had an "infatuation phase" since we only saw each other once a week, due to how busy our lives are.
So after having said all that, I think love is something so much simpler but so much deeper than I ever thought it could be. I've had a couple relationships before her where I was head over heels in love with the girl, and I always thought that true love was something like that, but even better -- something so amazing, so mindblowingly awesome, a feeling that could conquer all.
But the reality is that true love is so much quieter ... how do I describe it? Have you seen the awe inspiring Grand Canyon? Or anything else that's truly beautiful? It fills you with both an awe and peace from its beauty that makes you forget about yourself. You don't feel like you're on the top of the world, you don't feel superhuman -- in fact, you just kind of forget about yourself and you're just taking in the Grand Canyon. That's kind of what it's like to be able to take a walk in the park for a couple hours with my girlfriend. It's not really like that "head over heels in love" feeling, but a quiet, deep sense of peace and joy.
And true love is deeper than I thought it would be. What I mean is, it really gets into the nitty gritty of things. When I'm struggling with depression, she has to deal with the way I isolate myself from everyone and everything. And I have to struggle not to isolate myself, for her sake. She knows me, all of me -- the good and all the bad. And she no longer gets upset when she has to deal with the bad parts of me -- she accepts it, and endures it. And I no longer push her away and hide my bad parts (or at least, I've made a lot of progress here!) -- I work hard, and try repeatedly to struggle against myself.
Anyway, hope that helps.
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Love is too complicated. Its all about experimentating... to an extent.
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I've been in a relationship coming up on three years now. I think love is basically this, you can envision the rest of your life together and you're happy. Anything else doesn't really matter.
It's about how strong your desire to make your woman happy is and what you're willing to do to make fulfill that. If you're not at that point, it's not yet love, but that doesn't mean it's not in the cards.
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Ok.
In a nutshell:
You cannot know what love is when you are still in school.
As i have concluded with all my boners and whatnot, you should conclude that this is just hormones.
And pretentious is the wrong word. [Insert a word synonymous to naive with a positive connotation here] is better.
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she loves you if she lets you come inside.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/085/444/1282786204310.jpg?1318992465)
