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Baby don’t hurt me. Thoughts on Love.

For my whole life I thought I knew what the meaning of love was. To care for someone else when they are struggling, to cast aside judgement in favour of their character and humanity, and to love unconditionally those who love you back.

However, I still am finding myself asking the question, ‘What is love?’ accompanied with ‘Who am I?’ It’s a strange sensation. With the absence of love, is there loneliness? If this is correct, then is the absence of loneliness, love? This is an interesting phenomena whereby we are saying, if we feel nothing, do we feel something?

Okay back to love. Is it:

  • A social construct?
  • A feeling?
  • A value?
  • A weakness or a strength?
  • A hinderance or beacon?
  • Different things to different people?

It is a difficult ‘thing’ to label as it varies from person to person. Perception is a powerful force within each of us. The way we perceive love correlates to our relationship with it.

My stance is that love is unmeasurable, yet limited to what is real. However, dreams transcend these limits causing our imaginations to run wild. The thought of being with somebody who is forbidden is so difficult because through dreaming we experience it so vividly. We are transported to a fabricated world which is absolutely our own – but in which nobody else exists as they perhaps truly are.

Love hurts
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When we sleep we are at our most vulnerable. The creepy crawlies in our closest, our darkest secrets, fears and fantasies are no longer numbed or hindered by consciousness. I believe this is the moment that we are most pure, most transparent and the most honest with ourselves. Our consciousness traps us in a world layered with different-sized windows and broken mirrors. We cannot truly see inside ourselves until we are at our weakest, most vulnerable state and, sadly, we rarely unveil this side to others.

Vulnerability therefore evokes the truest forms of pure love. It is difficult, but perhaps necessary. We all feel different forms of love, which can be both a hindrance and a beacon for hope. A hindrance when not reciprocated, and a beacon when it transcends that of dreams and forms itself into a new reality. This is when love really becomes quite beautiful.

Love and vulnerability are intertwined
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I therefore believe that love exists both in a physical form and an intangible shadow; a value of love within an individual. Love can be made up of values such as kindness, passion, selflessness. It can also be attributed to lust, jealousy and perhaps even vengeance. When does love become passion and when does it transform into jealousy? When we are hurt by this value? When it creates a wound deep enough to manifest and cultivate feelings of anger, hatred and vengeance? Yes, I believe so.

A pure form of love may be this negative force of this feeling we attribute to

love. For some it is a positive feeling, being a beacon of light. I’m just wondering when I’ll finally get to see my beacon.

love is shadow

The thing about love is that it does indeed transcend time; the present, past and future, maybe even beyond death. It is the one emotion that humans are able to recognise and attribute to those that they have loved after losing them. I believe that we feel love in a deeper form when we lose it from our lives, as we don’t appreciate and truly grasp something until it vacates our little bubbles containing our lives. We really are a selfish kind.

I want to finish by acknowledging that I do believe in a pure form of love. Maybe that is naive of me, but it’s what has been instilled in me from the unconditional love that my parents share and continue to share with my sister and I. For as long as I can remember, ‘the one’ wasn’t a fantasy story, but a waiting game. Love is a unique, brilliant, horrific, strange thing. It can give you life as well as destroy it. I just hope this intangible ‘thing’ isn’t the cause of my own self-destruction.


Afterword: I don’t really know what this is, I’m just writing cause I feel like it. Don’t read too much into it! I do believe that love can elicit feelings of happiness, however is also synonymous with loneliness, loss of hope and anger. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the idea of love, I just have had some… interesting experiences with it.

A post from ~krisesandchrosses~