I've Looked at Love From Both Sides Now

"...from give and take and still somehow, it's love's illusions I recall, I really don't know love at all."

-Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now

Love is such a subjective concept with as many ways to describe it as there are individuals on Earth. Yet, it can be universally understood in a way where all the cliches about love make sense at once. Having experienced heartbreak I can understand why being dumped feels like you never have all the answers. But being in a relatively more objective position to witness the dissolution of a relationship that hit almost too close to home, the one thing I felt that would help everybody out was the truth. Even though my relationship has been going on for 3 years and counting, I still don't know what true love is enough to spout out a perfect description. There are days I wonder if I'm holding out for true love, or if it's just some neurological and hormonal processes that serve to foster interpersonal cooperation and the propagation of the human race. Is love really never having to say you're sorry? Is love something you constantly work at to preserve, even when it's so intense it hurts? If so, how?

Love keeps us alive. It makes us fearless of the world's indignities and makes us feel secure despite our own shortcomings and eccentricities. Some say it's what makes life worthwhile. Love stretches our heart, shows us the depths of our feeling, what sets us apart from most animal species. Love also hurts. So much that it's really beyond anybody's comprehension.

In fact, love can be so incomprehensible that the feelings from love appear to defy human logic. Sometimes the simplest explanations for why love died or why it couldn't manifest cannot be accepted. When the wounds are fresh and the feelings bottomed out by reality, the loved one that's hurting scrambles to create a reality that justifies their pain, their feeling. The truth just isn't enough for closure. Like the cause of their pain has to be something much more insidious, not just a mere "I don't love you anymore." They swear their partner cheated, or never loved them to begin with.

I can relate to that. When I was asked to "just be friends," I tried and wished so hard that it was because he never liked me to begin with, or that he was some jerk who just wanted to have his cake and eat it while I thought there was something more. It was simple, but too paradoxical for me to accept it as true that he did like me and was genuinely attracted, but just didn't want a relationship. Eventually I had to grieve my unfulfilled expectations and be able to harness my feelings. I had to stop asking questions about why it never came to be, and start acting as if there were answers. I can't manipulate the past or the present, but I can change my future. I can choose how I act on this love I once had, instead of seeing it as this inexplicable source of pain and suffering.

Love just IS. After all, trying to follow its sources of happiness and heartbreak just scrape the surface. There have been too many swings taken at an attempt to describe it perfectly, and to describe its effects logically at that. But knowing what it's like to have loved and lost, and to love and be loved in return, I can see why it makes people do crazy things: they're trying to make sense of it. Love defies logic. Love can't make its disappearance, its stubbornness to leave, nor its very existence plausible through logic. So where does that leave us? It leaves us in a position to just take this feeling for what it is, logical disconnects and all. Because for all we know, life goes on regardless. And what matters in life is what we make of it. What matters with love is what you do and make of it too.