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7/13/2025, 2:48:34 PM
>>24545668
I think the biggest misconception about love that people have is that it's a way to fulfill the emotional needs of the self. People want love, they long for it, as if it's a sort of hunger that would ordinarily be sated, and when it isn't, something is wrong. They believe that love realized can only come from an external source, and therefore must be pursued or waited for, but love isn't a goal that is reached through effort - it's a state of being.
When loving anything (our partner, a friend, a pet, the city we live in), we get it back. It feels good to love, to give, to help, to be vulnerable and to trust (even in the looming shadow of pain and loss) - so the true form of interpersonal love is one in which we enrich one another through this shared tenderness. It's not about longing and clawing and wanting to drink our fill of "love".
Love in literature is almost always presented from this completely selfish, inward perspective: stories of love operate on the scale of "unfinished" individuals who prescriptively require love in order to step into themselves, and its stakes remain purely personal - unless forcibly applied to a larger situation through fairy tale magic (e.g. if love is not realized, our heroes won't be able to topple the totalitarian regime á la YA novels) Besides that though, the way love has to work on the interpersonal scale is largely coincidental (or rather, the most practical way for it to happen because of human development), but spiritually, it's not just about loving a specific person.
True love to me is the way the self makes the conscious decision to forgive, cherish and gift itself to the world. The love of another (the love of anything, really) is also an expression of the love of the self, because of the absolution and reassurance that we ourselves receive through the act of loving. That coming into being has, in some ways, been worth it.
If the ideal form of interpersonal romance is it being unconditional (where the quirks and flaws of the person are not only inconsequential, but become the very source of the unquantifiable love and fascination we have with them), then to me the ideal love is being able to practice this unconditionality towards existence itself. Therefore, the stake of true love is the entire world - and as we find how we fit into each others love (lets call it relationships) we realize that all of us in our own ways, fit into the love of the world.
I think the biggest misconception about love that people have is that it's a way to fulfill the emotional needs of the self. People want love, they long for it, as if it's a sort of hunger that would ordinarily be sated, and when it isn't, something is wrong. They believe that love realized can only come from an external source, and therefore must be pursued or waited for, but love isn't a goal that is reached through effort - it's a state of being.
When loving anything (our partner, a friend, a pet, the city we live in), we get it back. It feels good to love, to give, to help, to be vulnerable and to trust (even in the looming shadow of pain and loss) - so the true form of interpersonal love is one in which we enrich one another through this shared tenderness. It's not about longing and clawing and wanting to drink our fill of "love".
Love in literature is almost always presented from this completely selfish, inward perspective: stories of love operate on the scale of "unfinished" individuals who prescriptively require love in order to step into themselves, and its stakes remain purely personal - unless forcibly applied to a larger situation through fairy tale magic (e.g. if love is not realized, our heroes won't be able to topple the totalitarian regime á la YA novels) Besides that though, the way love has to work on the interpersonal scale is largely coincidental (or rather, the most practical way for it to happen because of human development), but spiritually, it's not just about loving a specific person.
True love to me is the way the self makes the conscious decision to forgive, cherish and gift itself to the world. The love of another (the love of anything, really) is also an expression of the love of the self, because of the absolution and reassurance that we ourselves receive through the act of loving. That coming into being has, in some ways, been worth it.
If the ideal form of interpersonal romance is it being unconditional (where the quirks and flaws of the person are not only inconsequential, but become the very source of the unquantifiable love and fascination we have with them), then to me the ideal love is being able to practice this unconditionality towards existence itself. Therefore, the stake of true love is the entire world - and as we find how we fit into each others love (lets call it relationships) we realize that all of us in our own ways, fit into the love of the world.
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