Posted 7:25 AM by Blah blah

What is Love?

...asks Halo in Rice Bowl Journals.

From our discussion on RBJ I wrote:

Although I am a romantic, I also have a more practical view of love.

I don't believe in love at first sight but think more of love as hard work. It's a job...a wonderful and incredibly fulfilling job that feels more like play than work, but it is still work. "Self-discipline is love put into action."

I think if you are a person who has never experienced love, you have never really committed to anyone. Love is not waiting for a feeling of kapow and for someone else to wait on you hand and foot. Drop that sense of entitlement. We are not "owed" love. It's that process of giving giving giving your all to somebody or something and in the process, falling for him or it. Like Kennedy said: "Ask not what your country can do for you---ask what you can do for your country."

If you are not sure what you love, I'd say look at how you spend your time. What do you spend hours and painstaking effort doing? What do you hold up to high standards and strive to make better and better? Whom do you encourage, idealize, and forgive for their mistakes? Whose hands do you hold when they are down? All of that sweat translates into the fruits as well as roots of love.

From my entry on soulmates:

I think throwing relationship problems into the category of "well we just aren't meant to be" is a cop-out. For anything to flourish, and not just a relationship, we need to put 90% of our time into unglamorous, routine tasks. Maintenance is not sexy, but that's what lays the foundation to make the remaining 10% of our experience so sweet that we can imagine we have met a "soulmate."

I've often wondered what makes people fall in love. For instance, why do mothers all love their babies? Why do they consider their cheeks and chins the most handsome or beautiful they have ever seen? To us, maybe one baby to another looks the same. But to a mom, she has run the whole show from the beginning. She has been the director, producer, and janitor of her personal stage. She's suffered the agonies of morning sickness and the joys of ultrasound scans. She has put in 9 months of suffering and hard work.

After all of that, how can she help NOT falling in love with her baby? It's like that part of The Little Prince by Saint-Exupéry, where he is talking to a garden of stuck-up roses:

"You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."

And the roses were very much embarrassed.

"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you — the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose."

So once we get the superficial stuff out of the way, we settle down to cultivating the garden of our relationship. And with our sweat we infuse each other with our uniqueness and gradually BECOME soulmates.
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I feel the following applies to love too. By David Grayson:

Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly always a rebound from hard work. It is one of the follies of men to imagine that they can enjoy mere thought, or emotion, or sentiment! As well try to eat beauty! For happiness must be tricked! She loves to see men at work. She loves sweat, weariness, self-sacrifice. She will be found not in palaces but lurking in cornfields and factories and hovering over littered desks: she crowns the unconscious head of the busy child. If you look up suddenly from hard work, you will see her,---but if you look too long she fades sorrowfully away.