the Love Issue: Thoughts on Something I Will Never Be Able to Understand

Saturday - September 3, 2011 at 10:50 am · Filed under Diary, Friends, Heart, Life, Love, Men, Pain, Soul, Women and tagged: Benvolio, Defying Gravity, emotions, Jane Austen, Keira Knightley, Love, Matthew MacFadyen, Oslo, Pride and Prejudice, Romeo and Juliet, Rosings, Speak Now (Deluxe Edition), Taylor Swift, the Love Issue, Wicked, William Shakespeare

Again: Love never fails. Does it? Mhmm...

One of the many myths of life besides the sense of our being, the existence of extraterrestrial life or the way in which the universe makes us find and lose stuff so ridiculously fast is for sure one thing that can be reduced to the simplicity of one single word while still harboring all the complexities of the unknown lifetime of our dimension… LOVE.
(I will promise this time I am trying not to be so negative here but approaching the many views of people around me – those who love, those who have loved, those who have lost love and of course those who will never give up facing every fight for love.)

Love by definition of so often used Wikipedia ‘is an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment’. (Trying to keep my authenticity I have to say that I always like to talk about myself as being someone who is always emotional dettached to the possible maximum of a human’s ability to deny what is going on inside him. Let us be clear here… I have feelings too. I am just facing a lot of struggle and problems admitting this or saying so out loud.)
Nonetheless, love is something (whether we believe in it or we do not) that appears to everyone in another light and, apart from the quite impartial Wikipedia definition it truly is defined by actually being of absolute sentimental / subjective matter — influenced by our environment, our knowledge, our parenting and of course our experience with this fragile but ever present term… LOVE.

It is so simple to say the word out love but once it becomes acquainted with deep pain, memories, loss and states of life we can’t achieve this simple word / term turns into something that can haunt one soul for a lifetime. And though a lot of us have suffered or almost drowned in this silver pool full of emotions they never give up on it because they believe that out there someone special exists, someone who knows how to treat the vulnerable heart of a lover, the fair heart of a friend and the open heart of someone who failed with love.

B.

Wonderful easy going B is one of my closest friends and therefore I know everything about her life because I live right at the pulse of it. Right away, B deserves only the very best for I have need met such an altruistic character caring more about anyone else before she even dares to think about herself. Well, once being in love… tremendously, magically, head over heels, land over water, with all her heart, with all her mind… the guy left for studying in Oslo and ever since she hasn’t been the same when they broke up in Oslo. (I think she still has feelings for him actually.) B stopped to believe in love and maintained relationships on settling for something that feels good and nice and is a lot of fun. That is good for things in life should make you happy and smile and should be fun every single day. But it stopped and I faced myself right beside her at the danube hearing her words… ‘I think I have to believe in love again. After all the failure with guys there has to be something like love. This can’t be just it.’ Maybe she has a point here. Maybe she hasn’t. Maybe she became romantic again and I think, ‘Hm… if there is such a thing as love, she is the one who deserves to feel it.’

M.

We don’t know each other very long now but he has been in love and he thinks he still is. He is sad about losing ‘the love of his life’ as he likes to call this special guy whose name is written on his heart. We sat at the danube drinking beer when I wonder if he really believes in the one and well, he says he does and he says that this guy is the only one that has the ability to make him happy. Tough call for all the other guys that may be beginning to like him. He believes in the one. In love including the happily ever after. He believes in marrying the one and having children and a house with this special person. He really does and I sit there uncomfortably thinking… ‘Where did I loose all this belief? Haven’t I talked the same way one year ago?’ And he says, ‘He is the one. I love him and I suffer right now for I cannot have him.’ It is true. He obviously is sad about the end of this relationship and I think, ‘Maybe there is another ONE…’ and I say, ‘…but what if people are only in our life to mark it in a way? Inspire it, help us developing our character further, giving us a new view in life – a different ankle. What if people are simply made to be there for a limited period of time until we are ready to be set free or to set them free to mark someone else’s life – enriching it in all the possible ways?’ I can see in his eyes that he doesn’t think so. I see he still believes. This guy is the one for him. And I can’t change his mind by simply trying to be realistic here. And my thoughts fade…

While writing I have a lot of quotes and songs and books on mind that somehow influence me right here…

Taylor Swift… Ours (Album: Speak Now – Deluxe Edition)
‘…and don’t you worry your pretty little mind. People throw rocks at things that shine and life makes love look hard…’
It does. I think it really does. All the ups and downs we face every single day. All our tiny problems that sometimes appear so huge and then all this huge problems that sometimes appear so humongous. Everything around us has a huge impact on us. It makes love look hard with so many things standing in our way… life, because it isn’t the only thing we have to care about. You know that.

William Shakespeare… Romeo and Juliet (of course I pick this love story. Two reasons for that – firstly, I am currently reading the tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet and secondly, it is the one true love story that survives centuries and that even makes a neurotic, cynic kind of guy like me sentimental.)
‘Alas that love, whose view is muffled still,
Should without laws give pathways to our will.
Where shall we dine? Gods me, what fray was here?
Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all:
Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.
Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,
O anything of nothing first create;
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Mis-shapen chaos of best-seeming things,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep that is not what it is:
This love feel I, which feel no love in this.
Dost thou not laugh?’
And like Benvolio I can only say, ‘No, coz, I rather weep.’ Weep because true love for me seems like nothing we can ever obtain and because such a beautiful expression seems like a judgmental comment for those who do not believe in love, ‘What? You do not believe in something as true as this? Something even Romeo expressed in such an overwhelming beauty?’ No. I do not.

Pride and Prejudice… the movie (Staring beautiful Keira Knightley and outrageously handsome Matthew MacFadyen – and of course the book… the wonderful, romantic, perfect piece of writing that always touches my heart. Oh do how you do it, madame Jane Austen?)
‘…Miss Elizabeth. I have struggled in vain and I can bear it no longer. These past months have been a torment. I came to Rosings with the single object of seeing you… I had to see you. I have fought against my better judgment, my family’s expectations, the inferiority of your birth by rank and circumstance. All these things I am willing to put aside and ask you to end my agony.
Elizabeth Bennet: I don’t understand.
Mr. Darcy: I love you…’
And I just think, ‘Go on… end his agony, take his hand, kiss his lips, hold a firm grip on his arm and feel what he does.’ She does but she doesn’t admit until the very end of the story. And it is beautiful. And I wish someone would say words like that to me and mean them. Making me struggle with wanting to believe that love doesn’t exist in order to protect my heart from any more pain but having a little ray of hope in shape of a little voice telling me, ‘Dare. Try it. If you do not try – how can you fail, how can you win? If you do not try?’

The stakes are high. The water is rough. Life makes love look hard. And in the end maybe a little part of me wants to believe it but the other part, the hurt one, the broken into million pieces one just couldn’t take it again and in the end I always find myself thinking – ‘well, if that is love it comes at much too high a cost…’

XOXO

Mr.StrictlyIntimate

For the End… one more time because the picture is so brilliantly beautiful

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