Choose love!

I always used to find love songs and love poems cheesy. I used to ask myself, "Why do artists and great minds spend so much time pondering this 'love' thing, trying to put it into words?"

Well, then I fell in love, and I realized exactly why. Love is ineffable. It's so unbelievably powerful. It's magical. It changes you. I mean, I had known the love of family and friends, but this strange emotion was something otherworldly. I could hardly do or think about anything else. I was dissecting everything. Everything else in my life (work, friends, hobbies) took a back seat. I became a communication addict. An extremely impatient one. Love is very time-consuming. I don't mean to claim that I am a poet or any sort of great mind, but I eventually found myself contemplating love continuously. I would try for hours to try to express my feelings in a specific and sensible way. I was reading love poetry voraciously, listening to cheesy love songs and actually EMPATHIZING with them, beaming and sighing! Gross, right?

Why is the urge to express love so strong?

From what I've gathered, a primary motivation we humans have in life is to expand our selves and to increase our abilities and effectiveness. We are inherently social creatures, so naturally we do this in conjunction with (and thus in relationships with) other people. Love is particularly exhilarating because not only do we discover the potential of self-expansion for ourselves, but there's also another person who's interested in working with us, investing in our own self-expansion, who finds us attractive enough to spend copious amounts of time with. It's an infinite feedback loop, and it's thrilling. Love is selfish; we become obsessed. Love is wonderful; it makes us feel good. Love is enticing; life seems more beautiful.

But love never creates pain. Attachment, expectation and needing the other are the cause of that pain. It's easy to love those who give us what we want. It's much harder to continue loving once things get tough. That's why, in the end, it's a choice. I vow to pursue love all my life. It makes life worth living. Neither career nor money nor success nor any other goal can hope to compare with what love has to offer.

I wrote this once: "Days are so much longer with you in them; time seems to elongate because I will it to, because i want more time to think about you, to spend with you, to hold you... If I know what love is, it is because of you."

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous. (Ingrid Bergman)

Love makes mutes of those who habitually speak most fluently. (Madeleine de Scudery)

You know you're in love when you see the world in his eyes, and his eyes everywhere in the world. (David Levesque)

Love feels no burden,
thinks nothing of trouble,
attempts what is above its strength,
pleads no excuse of impossibility...
It is therefore able to undertake all things,
and it completes many things,
and warrants them to take effect,
where he who does not love would faint and lie down.
Love is watchful and sleeping, slumbereth not.
Though weary, it is not tired;
though pressed, it is not straitened;
though alarmed, it is not confounded...
 
- Thomas A. Kempis