Baby don’t hurt me

For my whole life I thought I knew what the meaning of love was. To care for someone else when they are struggling, to cast aside judgement in favour of their character and humanness, to love unconditionally those who love you back.

However, I still am finding myself asking the question, ‘What is love?’ accompanied with ‘Who am I?’ It’s a strange sensation that I’m feeling. With the absence of love, is their loneliness? If this is correct, then is the absence of loneliness, love? This is an interesting phenomena where by we are saying, if we feel nothing, do we feel something?

Okay back to love. Is it:

• A social construct?
• A feeling?
• A value?
• A weakness or a strength?
• A hinderance or beacon?
• Different things to different people.

It is a difficult ‘thing’ to label as it is differential from person to person. Perception is a powerful tool within each individual person, how we perceive love correlates to our relationship with it.

At this point, my stance is that love can not be measured, however is limited to what is real. Dreams however transcend these limits letting imagination run wild eliciting these feelings of jealousy. The thought of being with a forbidden love is so difficult because through dreaming we can imagine it so vividly. We are transported to a world which is unfabricated, but our own.

When we are at rest we are at our most vulnerable. The creepy crawlies in our closest, our darkest secrets, fears and fantasies are no longer numbed by our consciousness. I believe this is the moment that we are most pure, most transparent and most honest with ourselves. Because, really, the world has horrible windows and mirrors. We cannot truly see ourselves unless we are at our weakest, vulnerable state and sadly, we don’t show this side to others.

Vulnerability therefore elicits our truest forms of pure love for those who we wish to keep in the dark. It is difficult, but for some, necessary. We all feel different forms of this love which can be both a hindrance and a beacon for hope. A hindrance when not reciprocated and a beacon when it transcends that of dreams and forms itself into a reality. That is when love is really quite beautiful.

I therefore believe that there is both a physical form of love and a intangible form, a value of love within an individual if you will. Love can be made up of values such as kindness, passion, selflessness, but can also be attributed to lust, jealousy and vengeance for some. When does love become passion and when does it fall under jealousy? When we are hurt by this value? When it creates a wound deep enough to manifest and cultivate feelings of anger, hatred and vengeance? Yes, I believe so.

A pure form of love, in some, may be this negative force of this feeling we attribute to love. For some it is a positive feeling, being a beacon of light. I’m just wondering when I’ll finally get to see my beacon.

The thing about love for some is that it does indeed transcend time being felt in the present, past and future, therefore beyond death. It is the one emotion that humans are able to recognise and attribute to those that they have loved after losing them. I believe that we feel love in a deeper form when we lose it from our lives, as we don’t appreciate and truly grasp something until it vacates our little bubbles containing our lives. We really are a selfish kind.

The whole post may be idiotic and make no sense. I want to finish with the acknowledgment that I do believe in a pure form of love. Maybe that is naive of me, but, it is what has been instilled in me from the unconditional love that my parents share and continue to share with my sister and I. For as long as I can remember, ‘the one’ wasn’t a fantasy story, but a waiting game. Love is a unique, brilliant, horrific, strange thing. It can give you life, as well as destroy it. I just hope this intangible ‘thing’ isn’t the cause of my own self-destruction.

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Afterword: I don’t really know what this is, I’m just writing cause I feel like it. Don’t read too much into it! I do believe that love can elicit feelings of happiness, however is also synonymous with loneliness, loss of hope and anger. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the idea of love, I just have had some… Lets call them interesting experiences with how to handle the emotion. The human psyche is so complex, maybe I should’ve studied psychology!

~krisesandchrosses~