(Not) Another Article About Love
Love is an odd revelation of sorts. Its many facets can reveal mothers, fathers, siblings and bestfriends all in one persona. Even the god of love will surely come up with nothing when asked to explain why the
inexplicable is done when one is in love (anyway, his only role is to make people fall in love, not have people kill or climb the highest mountains because of love).
In our lifetime, we may have perhaps stumbled upon multitudes and multitudes of lessons about love. From poetic maxims to desperate pleas, from boob tube exploits to real life remnants or pieces of evidence of love both lost and gained, each tells of a scenario or an experience with different lessons learned or waiting to be discovered.
Now many times have we encountered how an oppressed party claims unfair treatment when a loved one falls out of love. The latter, on the other hand, with great and sincere difficulty, tries to admit favoring
another but still ends up as the oppressor, the two-timer, the heartbreaker. Various experiences may also perhaps tell of how we cannot imagine ourselves as falling for someone way below our expectations but eventually ending up with persons belonging to what we suppose to have considered as in the category of our mediocre standards. And then over and over again, we try to cover and clean up our acts by justifying how and why we have fallen the way we did.
It was a quite uneventful night, while crossing a boulevard, I thought of the oddity of love as this way: Sure I am in love, but how much can I really love a person? Do I try to make my loved one what I want him or her to be or do I let that loved one grow as a better person while with me? If after he or she becomes invalid or physically (and maybe, mentally) disabled, can I still proclaim to the whole world that my love for him or her is the same as it was before? Can I imagine living a single second of my life without seeing a certain thing and relating it to experiences with my loved one? And in the end, after all the difficulties and hardships, can I consequently announce that everything is worth it?
I would like to believe that anyone who has the capability of loving and being loved have these questions as our common ground. Each answer counts. Each figure sums up the truthfulness and wholeness of our love to a person - whether a partner, a friend or a parent.
For as long as the intention is sincere and good, no boundaries like belief, religion, race, caste or education could distort the infinite possibilities love can bring.
My answer to the questions above? I cannot come clean and speak that I am, all at once, able to love with no strings attached. But this I can definitely say: I have learned that loving and being loved are
unanimous to growing as a more mature individual, independent of the constraints of choking conditions and expectations in a commitment that is suppose to be free and voluntary. If after any of my loved one
becomes crippled (God forbid), I am crossing my fingers that my actions and emotions are as good as my mouth if I say that my love is still the same and all the more increasing, sans the degrading misinterpretation of love being interchanged with mercy and pity. And in the end, after
everything that’s been said, felt and done, I know that my heart and mind can consequently and unanimously declare that every second of memory is worth all the strength, joy and pain invested.
