I’m not sure I know or understand everything that love is. I live by knowing what love isn't, that’s a lot easier to figure out. After so many years of observing what love isn’t, you get to know at least a few things about what it is. Here’s what I learned so far:
Love is a composite of two distinct feelings or sentiments. They are acceptance and encouragement. Esoterically, the acceptance part is feminine and maternal in nature. A mother accepts her child, a mothers acceptance is infinite. A woman accepts a man’s seed to produce the children. Acceptance is passive. Acceptance is a feminine trait, it’s like agreeableness which is also a trait more prevalent in women.
You accept the people you love, yet love is a discriminatory emotion. When you love someone, you automatically place them above others. I discriminate against all women in favor of my wife because I place her above all other women. Am I a discriminating man? Absolutely. Don’t let people tell you discrimination is always bad. That doesn't make sense when you think about love. The process of discrimination brings you to the ones you accept and accept you in kind.
Encouragement is a masculine and paternal sentiment. Fathers encourage their children to become better versions of themselves. A father tells you to pick yourself up, because he knows you can. A man encourages his seed into a woman’s womb (that’s one way to put it anyway). Encouragement is active. The love of encouragement says: “I hope you can become who you are.”
You encourage the people you love because you don’t want to see them suffer. You want to see them happy and thriving, so you encourage people you love to keep doing the things you love to see them do. And you try to discourage them from doing the things you know will hurt them. This is one way you can see encouragement is a part of love.
All people have a bit of the masculine and feminine, or the maternal and paternal within them. Men tend to be more masculine and paternal than feminine and maternal but there is a glimmer of its presence and it can vary to some degree. Vice-versa for women.
When you’re in a relationship, you accept that person but you also encourage them. You encourage them to improve themselves and you encourage them in their everyday endeavors.
People say there are different kinds of love. Like the love between a parent and child is different than the love between husband and wife or between friends.
I don’t really know about that. All those so called ‘different loves’, have the two primary causes of acceptance and encouragement as their thrust, so what if they manifest differently?
People might bring sex into it, but you don’t need to have sex with someone to love them. You also don’t need to love the person you’re having sex with. Sex isn’t as relevant as popular culture would promote and have you believe. Sex is good but it doesn’t affect the goals or function of love itself.
I would say that there is just one kind of love and that’s love. Getting into a whole linguistic or semantic debate about the meaning or use of the word is needlessly complicated. Maybe there’s something I’m not seeing.
Love is great. I have so much of it in my life, I can taste it in my spit. I get the bulk of it from my wife and child. I get some more from my family, then my friends and more recently from the students at a high school I started working at. Sigmund Freud wasn’t right about everything and he snorted a lot of cocaine, but I do believe he was right when he said the only two things a person needs to sustain themselves in life are “work and love”. I’m good with those two things. It was good enough for my dad and his dad, I don’t know why it came as a shock to me that I would be the same way.
The problem with having a lot of love is the same as having a lot of anything else. Once you have a lot of something, you have a lot to lose.
And you don’t want to lose any of the things you have. It’s only natural. It’s also natural that at some point, even if it’s at the end of your life, you have to let go. You have to let go of every miracle you conjured up with that love.
I love life, but loving life is a funny thing when you think about it. What you are loving is the slow process of losing everything you love and know. My grandparents are almost all dead, my parents will likely die before me in time, my brothers too. One day, my eyes will shut forever after saying goodbye to my children, but I still love it all the same.
The world of my childhood is long gone, I’ve already begun to see things I love go away. I don't want any of this loss to come to pass but I’d have nothing to love if I had nothing to lose. It’s like being raised up to the sky, the feeling is sublime but your air is being choked away.
I sometimes fantasize and dream of being a lone cowboy in the old west. A hard man with nothing to lose, a super cool badass who isn’t tied down by anything or anyone. Wandering the old west looking for whatever adventure I could find. I would very much like to at least know what that feels like. I don’t believe it’s a very happy life. It may have some high points of excitement and intense gunfights, but I don’t know if I would like being that man more than I like being me. I guess I’ll always have the dreams.
I live in fear of losing what I love but what I love is one of the pillars that holds me up. I wouldn’t have made it as far as I have without love in my life. Love makes a lot of things possible, it’s as predictable as it is full of surprises. I wouldn’t give it up for anything. Of course love has to be a paradox, it would be disappointing and boring if it weren’t so.
