Joe of Boomershoot fame recently answered a few of Red’s questions on sex, but begged off on answering her question about love. Well, I’ve got an (admittedly, unsolicited) answer to this question that might work for her. When I was young, moody, and reading way too much philosophy, I formulated a definition of love that, to my surprise, has served me very well over the years.
It is this: You love someone if you’re willing to sacrifice your life to save theirs.
In my case, categorizing my feelings about someone as “love” implies a whole set of behaviors, moral choices, obligations, and attitudes that (to me at least) should be really different from relationships where I simply care deeply about someone. Trying to shoehorn all those things into a relationship that’s not really one of true love is, I suspect, the source of a lot of problems for people.
Since I came up with this definition, whenever I realized that I really cared about someone, and I was examining my feelings to figure out what they meant, I’d drag out the definition and see if it fit. “Am I willing to sacrifice my life for her?” Nope. In my heart, I knew there was a boundary on that relationship.
Eventually I surprised myself by saying about a particular woman, “yes, the answer is yes!” From that point on, as far as I (and we) were (and are) concerned, we were soulmates. We made our commitments to each other, moved in together and only ten years later, after we’d saved enough money, did we bother throwing a big party to “officially” get married. But we’ve known we love each other the whole time we’ve been together. And we know what it means, too.
Heinlein said something similar.
He said: “”Love” is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own…”
I couldn’t resist this one.
Defining love in a single sentence isn’t easy, and I do believe that everything the good young David has written above is true. It’s like trying to catch a handful of smoke, you can see it, desire it, long for it, and come to find that it isn’t the physical that can grasp it. It’s the intangibles that hold, the mysteries and unseen magic of the smile in your lover’s eyes.
I do believe in true love, love that goes far beyond the motality we all share. My wife, my lover, my woman, to give up my life for her’s is the easiest of choices. It goes deeper than that simple sentence. The grace of her touch, the curl of her lip, these and many other simple pleasures can explain physical desire. I was no virgin when we met, and I had found that the merely physical wasn’t enough. I felt, barren, I guess that would describe it best.
When I first met her, it was the sparkling fire in her eyes that held me transfixed. We saw each other on a Sunday, than tuesday, the day after that,….. We haven’t been parted from each other for more than a whole day since. On June 8, we will have been married for nine years. It was on the end of our first week that we went camping with her family. The fire had slowed to a glowing pile of embers. It was it that small firelight that I lay next to her and watched her face as she slept. The low whispers of others gradually fading away, in that moment I gazed at her face, and knew deep down in my soul that I couldn’t bare the thought of a life without her. I would give up anything, everything, my very life to win the heart of an angel, an angel that was a tiny whisper she was so small, so delicate. In that moment, I gave her my entire self, and I have never doubted or regretted that choice since.
I think that there are as many ways to describe love as there are lovers. My choice if I had to be brief, and put it into a sentence would be something like this.
Love isn’t purely the caress of a lover, but the fulfilling of an emptiness in your heart that you never really knew existed, an emptiness that vanishes just as quickly in the instant that your lips touch her’s.
Obviously this is a subject dear to me. Like every couple we are two very different people, yet in our pairing there is oneness that casts aside everything else. Maybe that’s the answer, a complete giving of self, without restraint, without condition, a giving that is as pure as a human heart can make it.
The first time I said “I love you”, was as unexpected to me as it was to her. But in the saying, I knew the truth of it as surely as the earth orbits the sun.
I never looked back after that.
Thanks for responding to my questions! Alot has been on my mind since I made that post. It has really helped to see other people’s thoughts on the matter. I feel like I’ve come to alot of conclusions recently and I hope that I can live up to my ideals.
~Red