What is love? How do you make it stay? Where does it go when it leaves? How can it turn into hate? How can you love more than one person in a lifetime? These abstract questions poets and philosophers have pondered since the dawn of time. Yet no one really knows.
It's complicated.
For love manifests itself in many forms: the love you have for your brother or neighbor or pet; a kind, generous love, friendly, stable and reliable. The love you have for your parents or children; a selfless, endless and bottomless love. The love you have for your God or Psychology or Self; a deeply spiritual and omnipotent love. The love you have for your partner; a committed and faithful and forgiving love. The love you have for a new lover; a passionate, uncontrollable and lustful love. Love inspires many things: beauty, compassion, romance, attraction, communication, trust, forgiveness, selflessness, faith, understanding, patience, staying in truth, reliability, comfort, safety, companionship, great sex.
But to think love is only that invites sloth and ignorance.
Love has a dark side. Love is one-hundred percent irrational. Love warps the mind more than a little. It could be obsession. Love could make you do things that you would never do, like blow up someone's phone in a worried frenzy with 100 text messages and 45 missed phone calls. And as your partner or child's phone turns back on as they come out of the theater, it is having a epileptic seizure, bzzzz, bzz, ding, bzz-bzz-bzz, ding, ding, b-z-z, bzz-z-z-, ding, ding.. If jealous, love will put you in a car and drive you in circles, hopelessly looking for what you lost. And you keep this darkness secret. You don't update your status: "just drove by my girlfriend's house fifty times. Anybody see her?" or "texted my boo 86 times, if you see him, tell him he's dead." If heartbroken, love will destroy your mind. Every song on the radio will speak to you. Clouds will shape-shift into the form of your ex. You can't sleep at night. Can't eat. You drown your sorrows in alcohol or other self-destructive patterns. Love is never clean. It is filled with mud and we drag are partners through this mud over and over, bringing the past into the present, recycling old issues into the moment.
Love is also fear and insecurity and revenge.
People kill themselves and others in the name of love.
Love can destroy.
We all walk wounded, but some never heal.
You want the truth: love is a monster. Fortunately, the monster can be tamed.
Happy Valentine's Day!!