i heart love

The other night, I found myself thinking about previous lives and previous loves and then about love in general. By all accounts, love is one of the primary driving forces for humanity [as is sex, but that's a topic for another time]. And with love, I include companionship, company, friendship, and so on...all involve some form of affection and desire for someone's company. We want to love, we want to be loved. We want to belong, to know that there is someone who accepts us, supports us, listens, shares.

Heinlein describes love as that state in which "another person's happiness becomes essential to your own". I like that. It's a little codependent-sounding, but then, love is inherently codependent. Love is ego death, wherein you give up a part of yourself and join it to another. You still maintain your own identity and individuality, and at the same time you add to it by including another.

In my not-too-long-but-still-long-enough time on this earth, I've found there tend to be two main types of attitudes towards love: one holds that love is an endless supply and has endless variations; the second sees love as finite, and can't be given to someone else without diminishing the love for another. A previous love of mine was the second type, and was jealous/insecure/uncertain any time I mentioned a close friend, or talked about a cool person I met...he felt that by letting another into my heart, I was compromising my feelings for him. He could not understand that there was room for many there, that we can love parents, friends, puppies, places, and ourselves without ever decreasing the supply. He thought that because the other people in my life filled slightly different needs or clicked in different ways, it meant that he was lacking in some way, that I was telling him that he wasn't enough to make me happy. [Ironically, he ended up cheating on me...so while I was spending my time reassuring him that I did care about him deeply and he did make me happy, he was looking for someone who wouldn't challenge him, someone he felt was singularly devoted to him and wouldn't make him face those fears directly.]

I think that life is uncertain enough that we should seek out love where we can, encourage it to grow. Doesn't matter who or what...just take care of each other, love each other, respect each other. I try to live by that principle as best I can. And to the people in my life, the ones I've let in beyond my boundaries: I love you.