There is that love which people say happens at first sight. That usually tends to be physical. Let us assume that it is not so. What attracted you to this person? Brains? But it is first sight! Depth? First sight?? ok well,define first sight. The first 10 hours of time spent with a person? First 10 minutes? Think about it. It might sound silly to waste time being so pedantic, but I believe it is vital to understand the working of our mind and whatever we wish to call our heart. Isn't it always something tangible? If it is not so, and this love is spiritual or "just there" then I would wonder about why that love, soon transforms into the typical 2nd stage of this "Love" rigmarole?...terrible..!!
2nd Stage Of Love:
So you decide (oh! come on! humour me!) to love someone. Good for you. Congrats! Mazel Tov!So you decide to stay in love too. Congrats ! Voila
Every day you encounter... wait, I am speaking about the days after the initial euphoria... so, every day you encounter this person acting like, well, any other human being. This person has her own idiosyncrasies, littleness, humour, pain, whims, lows, anger and allergies. If you never tolerated hypocrisy, you wouldn't take it from her either. But you decide to stay in love.
This person wants you buy jewellery and take her out to movies mostly because The person thinks that is what lovers do for the other (I tend to think that ladies get to benefit more, materially).Things slowly transform into a "supposed to do" pattern and a lot of life is spent in the fear of being caught being not-lover-enough.
So every day you revisit this state of affairs and wonder why you believe that you are in love. Even if the problems don't surface (highly unlikely, because you are living in this world and reality requires facing problems and tackling them), you slowly notice that the excitement is waning. The level of cheer is cheerlessly familiar and more a habit now. Things have become more about two people running a life together and doing the necessary chores. No, I am not being cynical. It seems to be the most popular story on the road and exceptions don't maketh a story.
Then there are people who try to get the zing back into the relationship (which only re-enforces the point about love being a decision). I think that is a wise thing to do, given that you have already decided to love and then live that love. They try new things - define new phrases (quality time! awwww!), get memberships in new clubs, go out more often, learn new languages together ("Oh! What is Japenese for "I love you"? and Catalan?". Personally, I think they should ban that phrase and demand of couples to invent new ways of communicating it!), do shopping, may be cook meals, go out on picnics etc. etc. etc.
I think woman inherently is not comfortable being alone. Someone said that a person will go to any extent to keep herself from having to live in loneliness. I tend to agree with him (her). People enjoy a good life and would like to bring that in with the least overhead (not all of us can be sheiks with a harem!). What is a good life is a personal measure and hence, one's love also tends to be a subjective choice, and a choice it is; hence a decision.
Rarely does a "spiritual" or "just there" love escape the rigours of the 2nd stage. Its origin might have been mystical but its life on earth is surely made of houses, bank balances and food on the table. People still want exclusivity (god save me from that one) and complete allegiance whether right or wrong. Life becomes a dichotomy of "our love" and "the world". Life really isn't that. It functions as a mix of everything but I shall withhold my opinion of the same.
So, whatever the start, love does roll into the mundane after a point. So love seems to be this lure into a stabilizing monotony of living and managing life in its secure state (I have known people breaking up because the guy decided to go join a startup and brought in enormous amounts of instability or the woman taking on a high pressure job which paid but rarely left any time for the emotional security of the family).
So love is not something that is eternal - not the commonly found strains of this microbe! Hence, I am not interested in something that is ephemeral and quite a pain to manage.
Falling out of love:
And then people tire and break-up. Not all, but there seems to be a steady rise in the per capita breakup rate. People are either treating love casually or are more narrowly focused on a single entity (self, money, career, etc.). Either way, one can only break out of love with a decision, if they got into it as a decision. If you are going to give me an analogy of a disease occuring on its own but being eliminated by the decision of taking medicines, then I would ask you to choose between considering love a disease or a decision. People talk so much about unconditional love, but it seems to be a conditioned decision to be unconditional in love. It really seems to be some rose-tinged dream cloud when people talk about unconditional love while have ziltch clue about the conditioning they have gone through. People who unconditionally love cannot choose and cannot surely fall out of it. If you choose to unconditionally love one person, there is a set of reasons why you chose this person (and not another) and they are perhaps a superset of what this person satisified as your desirable conditions to be met. So where is the unconditionality!? And why is it that you want unconditional love? Because you are ready to give it? Firstly, I don't believe that is as simple as you think it is and secondly, why hold that as a condition for giving your unconditional love?
So what's the big deal?
If we are comfortable accepting love as a decision, we will be less in pain when wondering over any or all of the following questions:
Why did I fall in love?
How did I fall in love?
Why am I in this relationship?
Why am I not happy in here?
Why does my state of being depend so much on this one person?
Would I behave the same way if it were someone else doing what this person just did to me?
Why do I want to run away?
etc etc.
If you believe that your "love" is not a decision then what do you think it is? Why don't you love your colleague too? Is love for you being compassionate towards someone? Feeling sorry for them? Every man, whether he has ever been in love or not, has an opinion about love. That is the major difference between love and differential calculus. Given this profound catchment of opinions, it is but natural to demand to know what is it that I think is love. I might (and that might never happen) write a post about what I think of love....
Then comes the major confusion between love and what to do with it. The most common strategy is to get married. What if the person cannot marry you? What if the person doesn't believe in marriage? What if the person doesn't want to marry you? Does your love fade? Does your love lose meaning? Is it still not a decision? Is
marriage all you crave for?
Think about it.
Or else, just enjoy the so called sate of being in love n wait till your arrange marriage.
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