Love Date Saturday, April 20, 2024 - 03:15 AM PST Topic Rant It has come to my attention lately that many people actually believe that "LOVE conquers all". Now LOVE can make a skinned knee stop hurting so much, a bad day fade quickly, or sad life more joyous, but it doesn't heal the scrape, make the boss nicer, or feed an empty belly. At most, it can distract you from other things, for a while. And is it really a good thing to be unaware of the actual state that you are in? Is LOVE, in that romantic roses and candle light sense, really a good thing? We marry based on LOVE, though marriage is not a romantic thing. We spend our lives looking for "LOVE" rather than caring for ourselves, learning things, or planting a tree. We use it to distract ourselves from facts about people and let ourselves believe that these things can be somehow unmade and to never have been, simply because we LOVE them. LOVE isn't a time machine, a superhero, or a magic wand that can change the past, leap tall buildings, or make the cupboards full and the beanstalk grow to the sky. It won't get you promoted (unless your boss is the one in LOVE). It won’t make the laundry go away. It doesn’t give life meaning and purpose. It is a psychological/physiological/sociological-induced state of idiocy and meanness. Follow me here; when you are in LOVE, you don't see someone's flaws. But you do, you just ignore those "flaws", whole aspects and traits and desires of this person. Is that nice? Is that good? Is that actually treating them like a human or just as a reflection of your desire? I say its mean and sets up a situation where you cant help but be let down and hurt, because you are doing it to yourself... and them! They might even think that you like them for themselves, and you don't. You like some romantic dream of them that is only loosely based on them, some total fictionalization of them based on your daydreams and escapism. Then when they don't live up to this bizarre "ideal" you are crushed and mad that them! Now is that a good thing? The fact that they are doing the same thing in their mind to you doesn't change the disrespectful and stupid thing that you are doing. It's not a tit for tat situation, unless you like to be foolish and get hurt a lot. It seems that there are people that like to have lots of drama, like to be in LOVE, perhaps so they can repeat this cycle a lot and feel LOVED. This is like a drug addict, getting high then crashing hard. I tend to avoid them because I am aware that they never like me, just some strange idea that they build in their mind of what they think they want me to be. I resent this the same way I resent people assuming that I am a devil worshipper just because I wear black. In many ways its the same phenomena, played out in their minds and has nothing to do with me. Is it a good thing to spend your life chasing after an imaginary person? To make that imaginary person the reason you get up in the morning, all that you during the day, and the focus of your dreams at night? Some people would say yes. But this idea is predicated on the idea that there is only one person IN THE WHOLE WORLD that you can love, is the other half of your soul, will enrich your life just by knowing them. Despite the evidence of this fallacy right before their eyes, people still want to believe that there is some "magical" person out that will make them whole and make their lives worth living. To believe this of course, they have to think that their life isn’t worth living and that they are broken. In other words, someone you probably don’t want to know. There are three delusions working here; that you can only love one person, one that enrichment happens becomes someone else makes it happen to you and that a person only has half a soul. There is belief you that you can only love one person and it has to be someone else. Do you love yourself? I don’t mean on those bad days where everything is wrong and broken and costs too much. I mean most of your life. You loved yourself when you were a baby, chances are. You loved yourself when you were a small child I bet. You love yourself now, even if you have trouble admitting it. Do you love your parents, friends, relative, or pets? "That is different!" the cry goes up from the crowd. How is it different? How is the love and trust you had in your parents when you were tiny so different from the love that you are trying to find now? How is the love that you feel for your best friend different that this state of "in LOVE" that you spend so much time trying to achieve? How is the love that you feel for a favored relative that very different from some wondrous state of being "in LOVE"? Because you love them as they really are, for the most part, rather than who you want them to be in the little soap opera in your head. That is how it is different. But these are people that you love; notice the word people, plural, not singular. You already love more that one person. You are really just looking for one MORE person to love. You are looking for some person that is “better” than all these other people that you love, someone that will make you a better person for loving them. Have you ever read a book, seen a movie, or better yet, talked to someone that has made you think, changed the way you look at something, or made you feel that the world was a more complex place than you had previously thought? A teacher that opened a whole new vista to you, a book that made you stop and re-order the way you think about something, or even a movie that showed you a new facet of life that you had never before considered, all these have enriched you soul. The way that you learned and grew from what you took in of these things is what enriched your soul. Those slow lazy days when you think and think and think have enriched your soul. You are the one that enriches you soul by what you think and do; some outside force does not force enrichment upon you. Why would you try to make your soul someone else's problem? That is how you become a better person, not through projecting your selfish daydreams on to some poor bastard that you saw somewhere. Do you honestly believe that you only have half a soul? In most cultures this is either impossible or a great and horrible evil. Do you really think that you are a massive spiritual oops, or that you are some truly ghastly evil thing and that you can make that mistake or wrongness go away by finding the "other half" of your soul? Most things, when cut in half, either die or grow that half back by themselves. Is your soul somehow so different that it hasn’t died or grown back? Do you honestly believe that souls can be cut in half and that some sick bastard chopped yours in half and hid the other half in one of 7 billion people, just so you would have to look for it? Is this what you call God? An entity that is so cruel as to take your soul, damage it, and then send you out to look for a way to feel that damage all the time. Can you feel more "whole" just by being near the other half of your soul? It seems to me that, if you could tell at all, it would make that loss more pressing and unbearable. I don’t believe that my soul was cut in half; I don’t think anyone can force wisdom and beauty into my soul. I don’t believe that I can only ever love one person. After all I already love me. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=665