I had to read this article, ‘Love’ by Scott Peck for Theo and I must say I have never been so enlightened on the subject. By God, it is amazing.
Apparently, falling in love is different from loving. I can be in love with you and yet not love you and vice versa. Although it is necessary for one to truly love, falling in love is only the beginning of it. For when finally all those romantic and cheesy tendencies fade we begin to scratch the surface and see everything clearly. Most times it is when we fall out of love with someone that we truly and deeply love.
What is love anyway? “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” That’s what he says. Therefore while the high that falling in love ends our feeling of loneliness and helps us to share our persona with another, in the end, it is narcissistic and only aims for our own welfare due to all of our insatiable need to receive affection. We fall in love because we like the feeling of it and for the sake of it but not necessarily to make us better people.
Let us all face it. We are all lonely and we all yearn to share whatever it is we have to offer with people just so we could get something in return. Worse comes to worse we just want what people have to offer and don’t really mind that what’s on their own plates are our own crap. We get all excited with how we share the same taste in music, watch movies and cuddle and how we can take strolls holding hands etc. etc. etc. But the thing is, after all of that fades and when we start to grow out of the feeling of falling in love we think… What now? We just wanna conform and stick by the relationship because we are ok. There’s nothing wrong with it and we get what we want. But the thing is it’s not necessarily what we need. And we’re only scared of the unknown and the inevitable. We will eventually become so comfortable to the feeling of having another person that we will be scared to live without them and all that. We feel that we will be less of a person without them. But we fail to see that we’ve been leeching on the feeling and the high all along and that we as people have become stagnant. We fail to stand on our own that only separation can bring us collapse. Hence all the emo songs about breakups immediately followed by the self-empowerment sections in the playlist. But it is paradoxical how in some ways, the growth and maturity that comes with separation is necessary to achieve togetherness.
People fall in and out of love and there are only two choices. To keep loving or to stay there, in that fleeting feeling that goes away faster than two shakes of a lamb tail. To keep loving although not as intense or passionate as falling in love is to achieve that extraordinary high that comes from wanting a person’s growth and happiness more than your own. It lasts longer and is more satisfying than the feeling of holding hands or cuddling or all that couple-y stuff. To truly love is to want to love yourself too and wanting your own growth. This maybe a hard pill to swallow but hey, it’s love right? It is what it is. That is love. Shit. That’s real love.
While I blame movies and the media for showing us all the sham that is falling in love that gives us all our false expectations, only getting us disappointed, I say let’s all grow out of it and be better than mindless robots who fall into the trap of this whole obsession that is falling in love (or “love”). I say let’s be better than that and contribute relationships that will really last in the future and not marriages that last shorter than Kim Kardashian’s.
And so I will say to myself nowadays: I don’t want to fall in love anymore. Fuck it, I wanna fall out of love with someone and love that person. I wanna fall so gloriously out of love with a person that I can truly love this person and make this person something more than what he already is, love this person so much that I’ll want nothing more than to make him happy because it makes me happy, to be in the paradox that is the selfishness and unselfish nature of real love.
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