Love

What does it mean to really love someone? I'm talking here mainly of staying in a committed relationship, I suppose, although the conversation might also apply to other situations. So much of our society today is focused on love as the all redeeming force for good in our lives. How are we to conceive of that love is one fo the main questions, I think, confronting our society. In most of the movies, in the books, in the songs, there is this idea that you see someone you are somehow "meant to be with" and then you "fall in love" with them, and that is how you decide which person on earth you are supposed to be with.

How is that anyway to run a life? I have a really hard time believing that there is much else working in those situations besides sexual attraction. But then again, maybe there is something more to it. It seems, in some ways, similar to "feeling the spirit" in LDS context. Is "feeling the Spirit" anything more than feeling an inner comfort by conforming to a clannish idea of God, who is a artificially constructed God whose main purpose is to drive that conformity within a society. There are, as I see it, clear societal reasons to band people together if willful clans, especially earlier on in our evolutionary history. I don't know if we will ever get past this clannish thinking, but maybe it can expand to the whole human race.

Anyway, maybe that kind of instinctive desire to conform is what really is "the Spirit" in our minds, but then again, maybe it is something more. Maybe there is a sort of "falling in love" that is bigger than simply an evolutionary guide to reproduction. But if that is the case, how high in the hierarchy or behavior should that "falling in love" be placed. I mean, do you only "fall in love" even at it's highest possible sense, only when you are single and available? What about when you have been in a relationship for decades? Does this higher love demand that you cut off whatever other relationships you have in order to follow it? I don't think that can be a fully acceptable way of living life, because even if there is some higher love, there is always the possibility of confusing it with some sort of sexual attraction.

I like the idea presented in the book, "the fault in our stars" that true love, is at it's core, keeping promises you didn't even fully understand in the first place. Maybe falling in love can be some kind of trigger to make you realize that the relationship you are in is really damaging to you, and there are much better options out there, but much more likely, I think, is that the promise of much better options is all illusory. That the proverbial grass must always be greener is eventually not going to be true. And every time you abandon an actual love in your life to find something else, you are going to have left a part of yourself behind, become more jaded and more hardened and less capable of love. That doesn't always  have to be the case, but I think it is foolish to believe that you can bounce from commitment to commitment without weakening the reality of your commitment each successive time.

The real value in love is that you have to work for it. Dan in real life says that love isn't a feeling, but an ability. An ability that must be cultivated and worked for, not something that is fallen into. I like that idea and feel its truth.