True love

Love is one of the most discussed feeling among the poets and story-tellers of any generation. So what is this feeling and what makes it so precious?

In my opinion, love is the capacity of individuals to cross the bounds of their self-interest and put the comforts of another individuals before their own. It is so precious because we all have the capacity to experience it but in reality only a few of us really manage to achieve it. It is much harder than you think. You have to overcome the boundaries of ego, physical comfort and at times rationality itself as you will have to do things that defy any common sense. It is when you are willing to take 10 steps to reduce the discomfort of another entity by 1 step is when you know you are in love with that entity.

I have often pondered about the notion of pure love and am finally beginning to understand what it might be. Pure love is basically when your feelings for the other person is completely independent of their behavior towards you. Most of us tend to experience love as a “give and take” experience where it basically becomes an obligation. For instance, X is willing to make sacrifices for Y because Y has made sacrifices for X in the past or X expects Y to make the same sacrifices and hence feels obliged to do so. Such relationships are highly volatile and go through a series of ups and downs because it is dependent on the interpretation of actions of your loved one. You have to constantly analyze and reanalyze their behavior. Imagine the amount of stress one has to be under when they have to constantly judge and be judged. I have often heard the people say that “we were in love but we don’t feel it anymore” which I think is a direct consequence of the stress of maintenance of such relationships that causes people to crack eventually and give up.

Pure love is when you love and appreciate someone for just the way they are. It has nothing to do with whether those feelings are reciprocated or not. It has nothing to do with their current economic or physical appearances. You love them because of their fundamental qualities such as “being a fighter”, “happy go lucky”, “sense of humor”, “intellectual curiosity”, “caring nature” etc. In this form of pure love, the actions of people are only a manifestation of their current circumstances and it should do nothing to change your feelings towards them. You can be angry or mad at them but you can never stop loving them. I believe that “true love” is when two individuals with “pure love” for one another get together with each other.

“True Love” can only exist between two independent people who can happily live alone but choose to live or spend a majority of their time with one another. It is a choice not a necessity. People have to learn to be content within themselves before they can experience such relationships. Remember that there is a difference between missing someone and feeling incomplete without someone. When I was young I heard the phrase that “When two become one, all it results is in two halves” – I think I am finally learning to appreciate and understand this phrase now.

~ by manand76 on April 6, 2008.