I have made a realization some time ago. The realization hit me very hard that I was dizzy. The realization that there is no such thing as true love.
What is love? Or more precisely what is true love?.
I think it is a need that a person feels. Just like hunger. Only in this case it is a hunger of the mind. So where do these strong feelings come from?
Why would one feel so much “strong undying love” for the woman who left him. A scum that doesn’t even deserve to be spit upon. I’ll tell you why. It’s all in the head. You have drawn a picture. A picture of the woman you love. Only it is a dream. It is not a reality. Becasue there is no such woman. The mind can play tricks on us to the point where we can’t defferentiate between what is a reality, and what is an imagination. A pure picture of a woman that you can accept with all the imperfections that she has.
The problem is that this won’t change anything. You’ll still have those feelings. Becasue feelings are very difficult to control. So what is the solution?.
How would you find peacefulness of heart, mind and soul if there is one?.
You’re right in that there is a form of love which is all about ‘need’ and feeding one’s obsession for the ideal form. However this is probably better called lust and is stronger the more psychologically insecure one is.
Nevertheless, there is also Love, which is not about egositic self-expression but rather about loving another as part of oneself. Thus their pain becomes your pain and in this way, and only this way, does love hurt. One doesn’t hurt for oneself and one’s own wounded pride. One hurts when the person, whom one shares one’s being with, hurts.
Having said this, one has to be a remarkable person to love in this way and majority of us do not. The best most manage is a mixture of love coupled with the responsibility of friendship.
I hope you set yourself free of your torment soon,
best, Seraph
Nichomachean Ethics, Chapter 8. Therein lies my response, certainly for an explanation of friendship(s). Love is an extension and amplification of the third type, the true friendship.
I’m not a great fan of Aristotle, but here he really hits a home run.
Love is more then a mere biological attraction(desperate need to pass on your genes).Love transcends sexual acts…it finds its home in the the realm of the mysterious—that of the intangibles. Though the emotions it provokes is real and known …its origins shall remain in the shadows. Each individual experiences its pangs differently (qualia)…So lets say it like this this love finds different forms in others and reveals itself as a subjective splendor.
I used to believe in love or loving someone so much that my world was nothing without them. But the more I feel in love, the less I am in love and the more I am in love with the idea of being in love with the most perfect of people.
I believe that love may one day be possible, but is love just acceptance of all the factors that irrate each other in relationships? If so I would rather die a lonely woman than be in love for the sake of being in love and just accepting what I grow to know as normal.
Look beyond what you feel to know what you need to know. Everyone has a perspective and mine is just looking into the cloudless blue sky, or deep shade of blue, encompassed by stars and feeling grounded by them. Not claustrophic, just comfortable. The answer may not be found inside, it may already be around you.
I personally love E.S. Person’s idea of ‘union’ and ‘merger’… what do you guys think…?
“Successful lovers establish a union, characterized by ongoing warmth, committment, intimacy, reciprocity, and some degree of mutual identification. But although the lovers may strive for complete merger (what we might then describe as ‘fusion’) they cannot sustain it. Instead, if they are lucky enough to enjoy a passionate love, their feelings of union will be interspersed with ecstatic moments of merger. These magical moments are experienced as epiphanies. At such times, there is, if not a loss of ego boundaries, at least a permeability of ego boundaries. During those moments, the lovers experience a sense of timelessness, bliss and transcendence. Their intermittent experience of merger is complety unlike the obliteration of the sense of self that one sees in psychotic states and which leads to terror. Rather, the self is preserved, the spirit exalted. Passionate love cannot be sustained without those moments in which the lovers feel they have achieved ‘merger’, that they are one. Part of the ongoing intensity of love is the insistent hunger to re-experience such epiphanies. For many, sex is the principal channel for the mystical urge toward transcendance through merger, though it is by no means the only route. Epiphanies can occur in moments of extreme intimacy in which the sense of merger is marked by no more physical an exchange than a gaze, the touching of fingertips, one lover’s arm aroun the other’s shoulder.”
