On Love...

Love is the one topic that people never seem to stop writing about. This fascination peaks my interest constantly and I'm always polling newly engaged couples, married couples, single friends, gay friends, straight friends, divorced friends and anyone that lies in between doing covert research to satisfy in my own mind why this fascination exists and what it ultimately means. Wait! (as the "romantics" thus far have already tried to close their browser and wash my negative and condescending voice from their memories).

I am a romantic! (well.... in some sense of the word.)

Webster defines romantic for us in a few ways:
1: consisting of or resembling romance (thanks so much Webster that sums it all up)
2: having no basis in fact: Imaginary
3. impractical in conception or plan: Visionary
4: marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized

Though I'm not sure what Webster exactly means by his definitions and am fairly certain that they may not refer to anything romantic at all.... I prefer Aristotle's definition (as paraphrased by Ayn Rand n the preface of The Fountainhead:

[Romanticism] is concerned not with things as they are, but with things as they might and ought to be.

This is how I'm a romantic. I don't think there is anything wrong with wanting things (love included) to be the way they ought to be. If you don't want things to be the way they ought to be - does that make you a cynic? Are these the only two categories for us all- or is there more on the board?

One of the things that fascinates me most with the concept of love is that it's not provable (well in an absolute sense). As a practical application of this thought - if your best friend tells you she's in love with the guy she met last night - how do you know whether she really is or isn't? On that same line of thinking, if you ask your husband (or wife) to prove the he/she loves you - what would that look like? The intangible relativity of love affords it a certain flexibility that makes it elusive yet incredibly desirable at the same time. The most interesting cases to me are when love appears to vanish. When you and your partner decide that you don't, after all, love one another (enough I suppose to stay together just for definition purposes), does that mean that the love between you never really existed in the first place? - that it changed character somewhere along the way into a temporal state of love? - or that you truly loved yourself and your definition of love enough to walk away before compromising either ideal. And when you've walked away - can you find love again? Do you deserve to - or was that your one shot at the whole thing?

I don't think there are right answers or wrong answers to any of these questions. I know that we all have certain expectations - both cultivated on our own and given to us by society. I think the fascination with love is that it makes people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do or affords other people things they would not normally be able to afford. We all pay a price - whether it be emotional, monetary, or physical - to generate our own ideal concept of love. These concepts are not one-size-fits-all therefore no one can safely judge whether the price is worth it for another.

Just make sure you set the price for yourself and that what you make of it is always worth the price it takes to keep it. Maybe if we focused more on assessing whether we're living up to our own ideals and less time assessing whether others are living up to ours, we'd all be happier and more in love than before.