Long Relationships

We all each have unique experiences of this thing we call love. As such, pinning down a precise definition of the word itself is challenging enough let alone categorising the sum total of human experience.

Starting at the beginning - not with a definitive definition of love but rather with my personal definition, as this is the only one I can reasonably give. Love is a connection. However, it is a different connection to any other; whether we are conscious of it or not we all form connections with those around us, our friends, family, partners, and even sometimes fleeting ones with complete strangers.

Love in its broadest sense can be applied to most of these connections. People love their friends and they love their kin but normally in a platonic way. So, is love just another emotional connection plus sex? Yes and no. Lust is an important part of love. It is in no way shallow to say that you must lust after your partner in some-way, it is just a fact. Remove lust and all you are left with is a close friendship. However, with just lust you are left with, in effect, a one night stand. Speaking personally I often find personality traits sexually interesting. To my mind some of the un-sexist people are often society’s deified icons of sex; model’s, for example, often have disturbingly vacant eyes something which turns me decidedly off. Loving somebody involves spending time with them outside the bedroom so it has to involve more than lust.

It’s supposed monogamous nature is one of the great love myth’s. Why is it perfectly socially acceptable to love more than one person in a friendship sense but not in a partner sense? Truly loving more than one person in a lifetime is entirely possible and, although I have no statistical proof, is most likely the norm.

Sad to say but sacrifice is an important part of love. It is also a necessary part. Acts of sacrifice play an important and often inspirational part in human culture because to a degree, greater or lesser, it involves us overcoming aspects of our own, innate, nature. If love was all about just the good times then it would not be half as treasured as it is. Of course, they must be those too but a view of love as just this, that it comes with no effort or sacrifice without obligation or responsibility, is not rounded but idealistic and blinkered. Ideals are fine but like everything else they always carry within them there own negation, there own negative.

Some would say love itself is an ideal and there is some truth to this but like most truth’s its one-sidedness it fails to recognise the very real experience of billions upon billions of people who are in a very real state called love. Here we find my ultimate defence of love. It’s real. It happens. Whether we have been in it or merely observed it nobody can deny that. I have just attended a wedding of two of my friends. Could you ask for any more tangible proof of actually existing love? Whatever happens to them in the future, and I sincerely wish nothing, in the moment of there marriage there is a proof of actually existing love that is tangible. It is as real as these words or the chair you are sitting on.

Anything that is capable of inspiring great good is also capable of inspiring great evil and vice versa - although things are harder that way, it is easier to destroy than create for example - and so it is with love. It has been with us in some form from when we were nothing but another animal and will remain with us until the sun sets on the ruins of our civilisation. No matter how many times we get burnt - and no doubt there will be more - love will always remain one of those great things that cut to the very essence of what we are as a species, something that makes us truly human.