[12:11 a.m.] : [2003-05-18]
|
I�ve been thinking about a question raised lately on the diary of my last girlfriend. the question is about love, and whether men can fall in love and stay in love legitimately. I must admit the question rather hurt because I could of sworn I wasn�t lying whenever I told her I loved her. it also struck a blow because I have tried to work to make sure I was not the kind of guy to lead a girl on or rush into a relationship that wasn�t heartfelt on both sides. So someone who had been close to me doubting my capability of love and the quality there of and questioning my secencerity raised in me questions about my ideals on the nature of love and how I live up to my ideals. the nature of it (love) has always bothered me because there was a lot about it I felt and couldn�t quite grasp on the whole. I�ve had some thoughts about it for a while but most where ideas I could not fully articulate. like I would have sentence fragments on a thought but couldn�t put together a full paragraph. There have been a couple of main points I�ve been trying to bring together with little result on my own. I started reading this book last night that had a lot of things to say along the lines of what I had in my mind, it kind of brought a lot of things together. so now I am going to try my best to explain what I�ve had in my head and what I�ve come to understand for/about myself. one of the main things I�ve been thinking lately is the main difference between how people perceive and give love. the main two ideas of love being loveA-how we feel towards someone (warm fuzzies) & loveB-how we behave towards someone(which seems to be stimulated by loveA, but I�ll get back to this). it is easy to get stuck in a loveA mode where you just get caught up in the feeling and that is all. loveA is easier because you don�t have to recognize or validate effort because you cannot always control how you feel about someone but what you must understand is you can always control how you behave towards them. I was stuck in a loveA mode for a long time. love is defined in the media like it is in the dictionary as a feeling and used as a noun. there is not a popular definition of love describing it as a verb, except one place that I have found. to paraphrase this one definition of love as a verb love essentially breaks down to a couple of areas, those areas that combine into what love and/or the nature of love is are as follows: patience, kindness, humility, respectfulness, selflessness, forgiveness, honesty, commitment. I�ve developed the idea of those attributes over a long time line based on many experiences. Some to a greater degree than others. I�ve noticed in myself the change from a loveA to a loveB outlook. Not to say I don�t feel love, like I said earlier, it would seem that loveB is generated as a natural response to the feelings of the loveA type. That is the area that has always given me the most trouble in understanding the nature of love, why I love and how I love. it is also why people run into the most trouble in loving and being loved. Most trouble with love is that the feeling doesn�t last forever on it�s own. the focal point of the book, for me, that brought most of my fragmented thoughts together is a new term for me, praxis. as this book puts it- when we are committed to love and others and continue to work at it, positive feelings will eventually flow from positive behaviors. and that is what I had the hardest part trying to understanding on my own. I used to be such a bleeding heart and somewhere I changed and wasn�t sure how but I knew that I could love in a different way. not just being in love but being willing to love, that was the simple key. my will being my ability to align my intentions and actions to choose my behavior (to paraphrase again). with the proper will i can chose to love, the verb, and meet the needs of the loved and sacrifice for them and in turn build the love up. I have only go into two relationships like this. I worked at loving her, mind you it didn�t take much to get to the feeling aspect, but I was willing to love her going into it and I legitimately loved her as a result. as opposed to other girls where I loved them and so I loved them as the result. both are valid points/types of love, both are love. I have enjoyed both and I can see from it all how and where I have grown. I can however say which I have enjoyed more and got more out of. I did see a problem those two times, that I can only control my behavior. It is hard I believe for a loveA type to fully understand where a loveB is coming from in a relationship. I think that it can seem if there is not a feeling motivating everything it can seem like some one is cheating and being cheated. at the same time on the reverse loveB to be fully in line with the points of love listed above have to realize they can not influence who they love or else they are cheating. they can only live up to their ideals of love to the best of there ability to put their loved one in an environment to grow. but the hard part is that you can only help someone grow you can not make them grow so if there is no growth or slow growth then it gets hard to keep in line with the parts of love. in retrospect that is where I have stumbled, admitting there is nothing I can do and having to face the fact that I cannot make anything change in others. I can only change and affect myself. and I have had to change myself to understand how it is possible for me to love someone who has broken my heart or to love someone who has not loved me in return or to love some one who doubts my love. but as long as I am able to love them I will love them and with love there is hope. I admit it all this is extremely �self help� esq of me, the book being I suspect on the same reading list as many by someone with the last name covey which is highly uncharacteristic of me and I hate to admit getting anything out of that kind of book, but I will admit it has helped me to reach a better understanding of things so I can understand and hopefully help to show why I feel the way I do. so to finally get to my answer on the question of if it is possible for anyone to really be in love and to stay in love it all depends on how willing someone is to love (legitimately willing) so yes it is possible (even for a man) for someone to stay in love. it is just not very easy to understand how or why or that it is in fact possible, but it is. |
