Who cares what love is?
What is this thing called love? I don’t have the faintest idea, writes Karin Arad
What is this thing called love? In fact, who cares?
I know it’s strange to hear this from me of all people. It’s strange for me, too. I’ll immediately explain how I reached this point. (Oh, will I explain.) All my life I’ve been asking this stupid question, only to discover anew each time that what I had thought was absolutely wrong. No question is asked more, and everyone asks it.
Is it something you must have or you’ll die? Or is it a pleasant and comfortable arrangement that doesn’t restrict you even for a moment?
Is it something emotional and incredible? Or something routine and secure?
Is it something fitting? Something borrowed? Something blue?
What is it? How do you identify it?
Love has always caused problems
And I’m not talking here about myself - I can experience all these feelings within a month and a half while dating the same guy - I’m talking about you, the sane people out there.
Love. It’s a concept that has always caused problems. It’s the word we all know how to say in the most languages, and everyone knows what it says. It’s the subject of millions of songs and poems. Love is the main matter humanity deals with, but it still has no definition. There is no way to know it exists, and even a doctor cannot help if you’re dying of it.
Most of us are deathly afraid of it and mainly know how to suffer from it, but for some reason we want it more than any other thing. Why? What’s going on with us?
The answer is simple: Love is life. Everything else is death.
Just saying, “I love you,” is incredible. It’s so much fun to let loose emotionally, even without any connection to the truth in it. And in these moments, when I feel pure love, it’s quickly replaced with foggy feelings of ambivalence.
And if this is the way it is, then who really cares what love is or whether it’s real? The very possibility to believe in it, even if it continues just a second and a half, makes life more tolerable.
And that’s healthy. It’s healthy to feel things, to be overwhelmed by them, and even if it hurts, the pain is good.
When feeling is there, it's there
To love is like to march. When you’re in love, you’re moving forward; when you’re not, you’re standing in place.
Maybe if we would check ourselves every minute, we would discover love is something that comes and goes without any connection to the person standing before us, save for the fact he brings it out. Maybe. I don’t know. What I do know is that when the feeling is there, it’s there - and there’s no arguing with it.
If I feel love at a certain moment, this says that at this certain moment I love him, and it doesn’t matter if I’m in crisis, or hurt from childhood, or am mixing pain, longing and a sense of missing love, or if the feeling changes every second. As long as this is how I know how to experience love, this is apparently love for me. And until I learn to experience another kind, this will remain the case.
Perhaps love is the intense emotion that comes and goes. But we, in our stupidity, impose the desire that it will last forever, and be stable and consistent like a solid object, a chair for example.
What is this thing called love? I don’t have the faintest idea. And it no longer matters to me. What’s certain is that it’s unlike any chair I’ve ever sat in - and boy does my butt hurt.
Karin Arad: Just saying, "I love you," is incredible
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