The Signature of Love

I was a sophomore in high school the first time I feel in love and if you were anything like me you might remember the feeling being somewhat exciting, incomparable, and unbelievably forbidding; but only because we wanted to hold on to it as long as possible.  This was the first time I had allowed myself, or found myself capable, of sharing an idea of love similar to that of which I share with my family, a love that was between myself and another.  Love produces emotional feelings of well-being with elevated levels of Serotonin, Oxytocin, and Vasopressin in our systems, these are chemicals that, will essentially, make us feel good, and assist in increased functioning of our limbic and nervous systems.  They are feelings that we enjoy experiencing and would strain to hold on to.  However I believe this explanation of love to be limited, this is a scientific illustration of our feeling -- just a description -- it is not a basis of or the meaning behind love. 

Love creates in all of us a strong intent to be better, and not necessarily for ourselves but in the interest of others.  We will build from it and grow by the agency of it, we are more demanding of ourselves yet increasingly more kind and responsive towards others.  As a result many have considered love the most complicated idea conceivable.  In actuality it is the single more straightforward and therefore basic idea there is.  Love, in essence, is not a feeling -- it is like whiteness -- love is the harmony of all feelings.  It is what makes reality comprehendible and the universal attainable.  Though this love, as we know it, tends to change as we get older.  When we were younger it was a feeling and something to revere, as we grow older it becomes a skill and something we have to practice.  It is grounding reminding ourselves of what it felt like to be nervous.  The junior high dance standing on opposite ends of the gymnasium.  Subdued by a love-sick-nervousness, and rapidly developing now-or-never feeling that envelopes us to the point of paralysis.  It is an anxiousness that seems to generate a weight in the pit of our stomach, and feeling that dictates our thoughts making it difficult for us to think about anything else.  A time when we used phrases like “the love of my life.” Now, we’re older, and we forget what it felt like to know what it means to love as opposed to our just, kind of, understanding it.  I believe that we knew it better then and we have since complicated things. 

I have learned that we create this mental shift between love and an idea of love, and with this distinction we are no longer capable of contrasting the two.  Love surrounds us creating an idea that is often intimidating and difficult to personate, it’s this same idea that women are expected to maintain a degree of beauty associated with perfection.  A society decides how women are supposed to be and to look and this provokes an image that is often unappeasable; much like the ultra-masculine idealism that follows young men around as they are raised, also, to believe an image that is predetermined by our society.  This idea of love has been fashioned, and manipulated by song, film, and an expectant society.  Though I don’t mean to imply that this love that is managed by music and film is falsified, it is very real and more beautiful than any of us can possibly imagine.  However we are lead to believe at an early age that we will find it, or have failed in some degree in life if we cannot maintain or accept the idea. 

We have forgotten that those feelings we experience when we are younger that many of us look back on quizzically, wondering what has happened as we got older.  The love of my life feeling is, in fact, a love of life and as we get older age, indifference, and this society will craft that love into this idea that we market at something much differently, as that something we are expected to obtain.  We let the excuses of a society convince us of this idea and as a result we begin to lose our lust for life and the unknown that we have yet to experience along with those dreams and passions we had, and the desire to share them with another person. 

We need to learn to refashion the relationship. Because the relationships that last are those in which each person accepts one another, enterprising in your similarities while being influenced by your differences.  And early on developing strong communication -- verbalizing your expectations, intentions, and dreams -- between one another.  Which will thereafter establish an ability to share those things that would otherwise seem the most difficult to express, and you’ll begin to understand, subsequently that love is the act of creation itself, because-the fact is-you have never been without it, love does envelope you and it always has.  To share this love with another person means to acknowledge a mutual awareness of beauty and existence while willingly engaging in the unimaginable shared opportunity to create this passion and life, together.  Love is water and we are the fish and a fish cannot exist without water.  Love can be unexplainable, and often unbelievable but does a fish believe in water?