Feelings flow like the ocean’s tide
rising to flood and cover the seashore
but then certain to ebb and dry
leaving the sand thirsty once more.
Passion burns like a raging fire
warming the soul with the flare of romance
but it is quick to fade to ash and expire
leaving its pit as cold as it began.
Love at its heart is not so fickle,
it knows the high tide will come back again.
When dull embers may still be rekindled
It promises to try and be patient.
I have never been one for words,
never felt they really meant much;
there are too many things to say
but its all said better with touch.
My fears fade away in your arms
and there’s comfort when you are near.
The sound of lips pressed together
Is the most pleasant thing to hear.
I will try to improve my words
to express the joy that you bring,
and I hope that I can give you
the same warm and wondrous feeling.
My mind is still plagued by the topic of love, though I suppose there are far worse things to dwell on. Today I was wondering if it is truly possible to love somebody wholly and completely. It seems that it is not.
As humans we are all imperfect beings and we all know it. We have our flaws and weaknesses. They say a part of love is loving all of each other’s imperfections, but I would say that it is more accurate that love is about accepting them. If we truly did love the imperfections, then would we not be disappointed when they are gone? People can change, both for the better and for the worse. Everybody knows that we can be better and I believe that part of the duty of a lover is to support their love’s improvement of character.
But no matter how hard we try, it always seems that some of our characteristics are not possible to change, or perhaps they are just too difficult to change with reasonable efforts, perhaps if we did change them we would no longer be ourselves. I know that personally I have many quirks, plenty of which one would expect to be contradictory. I do not expect that any one person would be able to love all of these quirks, but I do expect that one can love me for some of them and accept that I have the other ones.
Quite frankly, I myself do not know whether I enjoy having those quirks or if I would prefer to not have them. I would say that in general I do love myself to a reasonable degree. Even so, I recognize that I have plenty of room for improvement. Yet I do not know which way I should go to truly improve. There are plenty of paths that we have in life, numerous ways in which we can focus and orient ourselves, and sometimes going down one path means that we must forsake others. Which direction is the best way to change, and what is truly good for that matter, are things that escape me.
What I do see as an issue with is when somebody tolerates but does not accept an imperfection. If were are merely tolerating something, then it is serving as a constant strain. While it is possible that people can change, one should never expect a person to. It is possible, not likely, and certainly not inevitable. Wanting a person to change a part of themselves is also putting a constant pressure on them. Further, if the tolerated by not accepted characteristic is not something that the person themselves wishes to change, then it will be a constant source of contention.
What I fear in a relationship is that the person I am with will be unrealistic until things are too late. They tell themselves they are alright with things that they know they are not, and they tell themselves that they can overlook things forever. The strong feelings of attraction at the beginning of a relationship do not last forever, but plenty of times the disliked traits will last forever. One can only tolerate something for so long, there comes a point where they must accept and move on or reject and move apart.
I suppose this does leave a question of how do we know what we are truly able to accept. Indeed, tastes and preferences can change. Perhaps something that you are merely tolerating you come to one day love. Perhaps one day something that you accept now becomes unacceptable to you later. Can we ever be certain that those who love us will always be satisfied with how we are?
Still on the topic of love, especially that which we consider to be true love, it seems that the truest of loves is that which we call unconditional love, that is if such a love truly exists. To love somebody unconditionally is to love them no matter what, even if they fail at all of their endeavors, even if they reveal some kind of unsightly secret, it is to still love them. This love is often the kind of love that parents claim that they have for their children. It comes with a reassurance, even if life is hard and nothing seems to be working out the way you want it to, then there is always that love to fall back on.
It seems like something that is too good to be true, and things that sound too good to be true are usually in fact so. Such a love is unlikely to truly exist. While there are some cases where it may in fact exist, or perhaps when kept within the limits of “reason” it does exist, but when we examine the extremes, it seems to fall apart. Would a parent still love their child if that child murdered all of their siblings and then locked the parent away in a basement? Perhaps some would but I feel that the average one would not when there are already many of whom that do not support their children if they become murderers of strangers, let alone other family.
There are some families of murderers that say that they too feel as if they lost a family member just as the families of the victims. They often have no idea that a member of their family was harboring thoughts of murder and feel that something about the murderer must have changed, or that they were not acting like themselves. Indeed, perhaps a parent would say that they do love their child no matter because if said child would never do such a thing were to murder their siblings, they would not themselves.
But committing such an extreme act is not the only way in which a person can act in a way that is not how they are known by their parent to act. There are plenty of times when a person will have acted heterosexual their entire life and at some point realized that they were homosexual and came out of the closet. While that is becoming more accepted as time goes on, there were plenty, who were once assured that they would be loved no matter what, rejected by their parents.
When the promise to love you unconditionally is made, it really comes with the condition that you remain the same as you are now, or do not deviate too heavily from who you are. It is also very possible that a person just breaks, their promise. The person who did promise to love you could themselves change in such a way that they are no longer themselves. These two conditions, either you change or they change, seem to be the same conditions that can bring regular love to an end as I discussed previously.
People cannot always control how it is they change. Tastes change, preferences change. circumstances change. How can one ever be certain that the ones that love them no matter what will really still love them if they change for the worse?
I often wonder about love, especially that which we call “true love,” if there even is such a thing. The way that we throw the word love around so often makes it difficult to know what is real enough. We say that we love things all the time, whether it be that we love pizza, the Red Sox, or Game of Thrones. We love the feeling of the sea breeze across our face on a hot Summer day and we love our pets, and of course we love our family.
Now love of family, and perhaps that of pets as well for those who truly consider them to be part of the family, seems to be the only one of those loves that we really consider to be a love. The others we would merely say that we really liked them a lot and were using the word love incorrectly to emphasize how much we like them. Though if we were truly passionate about such things, such as an artist saying that they love art as it is their life, that would be considered an accurate use of the word love as well.
The more proper uses of the word love I gave examples of seem to come with more of a sort of permanence about them. While we may always consider Game of Thrones to be our favorite show of all time, how actively it plays a part in our life varies greatly by when the season is airing and there will come a time when it ends and while it will always hold a place in our heart, we are unlikely to think about it as frequently. On the other hand, our family will always be our family, and as for passions that we dedicate our life to, we cannot imagine those passions ever not being a part of our life. Even if we may one day change drastically and have different passions, our current passionate self would look at that potential future self as a different person.
The love that I wonder the most about is romantic love. Romance has in it that temporary factor of the loves that are more so likes and interests but it also holds the quality of being something permanent. We want to love somebody, to be with them forever, to have them as a part of our life, to perhaps marry them and become a family with them. For many there are many loves throughout their lives, though they say that you will always remember your first, which also has a permanent quality to it. When we do cease to love somebody, we tend to attribute it to various reasons, whether it be a simple drifting apart over time, or the person turning out to not be who we thought they were, or the person turning out to not be what they wanted. These seem to involve a change of some sort, whether it be a change in perception of the person, perhaps even due to an actual change that the person has made or merely due to finding out more about who they already were, or a change in our own preferences whether due to our tastes changing or due to us realizing what it really is that we desired from the beginning.
When we stop loving somebody, did we really love them to begin with?
Beef McMeat 