What is Love? - (Philosophical?) Musing

What is love?

Here is a weird one, a reflection on what I think love is. To start, and bear with me, I think we should define what love is not. Love is not hate, it is not hurting them who you love, and it is certainly not jealousy. But what is hate, what constitutes hurting who you love, and what is the basis of jealousy? They say hate is only a step from love, that you can hurt those you love without thought, and that jealousy only has so much leverage because of love. Is love the springboard? It cannot be thus, for love is obviously not these things. How can love become so cruel and bitter? Perhaps love is the exception to logic, perhaps it is the anomaly of human thought, that which stands on a precipice between madness and joy. In this regard, love must be tied to ambition, and like ambition love is human. Not a thing alive knows the ambition of man, nor his love, but also man destroys and takes; scorches the Earth and what lives on it for his own benefit, his ambition. There we find another connection between love and ambition, both become catalysts to crueler stuff, even though both are made of brighter feeling. So, do love and ambition belong to humans and humans only? No, at least not love, but that means that only ambition belongs as a human exclusive. Then, is the tenancy of ambition upon a human mind the true catalyst that turns love and other things into monstrous acts? If that is the case, the question is begged, what is ambition? You can define it easily as the desire to achieve certain things within your life; when you desire to become a doctor, work as hard as you are able because of that desire, then you are ambitious to become a doctor. This must mean that if you have ambition to love, you will do everything you can to love, and also to preserve that love; you desire love. What can be done then, to those ends? The first thought in my mind is to be with who you love, the second is to make who you love happy, and the third is to protect who you love. All of that, at any cost big or small, in better words desperation. So desperation and ambition, I believe that these two will make anyone do anything. If you are ambitious, thus desiring for something at a big or even all cost, you are wont to be desperate. With time, want and the ability to do things will turn into a perceived need, or desperation and the inclination that you must do things. Why does ‘to do’ become ‘must do’, is ambition so cruel a mistress to punish you with time? No, because time does that on its own. So time, desperation, and of course ambition, these must be the architects to the cruel ends which love can bring. It can only be so, right? If the living feelings of ambition and love are made of brighter feelings, only the darkness of desperation and the inhuman march of time can sully them, this has to be the case. Except it is not, at least not exactly. Yes, desperation is ugly and perverts every other feeling, yes, though time can never corrupt it does erode. This does not explain how man has on occasion come past this and shown how love prevails. The very existence of believers in love and humanity continuing to exist is proof of how nothing can be completely sullied, it implies that there is something to believe in and something to live for. Is that the true love that these few have achieved then? Of course, you can argue that these are products of a false hope, that some are alive but do not live; that we live on a false promise and perpetuate it for the next course of suffering. But if that is the case then why is it that those who argue so have lingering hurt in their heart from love? If love was a losing game from the beginning why resent your loss, if you were meant to lose, there is no shame or hurt in that. If love is truly a false promise why not be happy that you are unshackled to it? No, love exists for sure, it would not hurt as much as it does; it would not linger for so caustic an outcome, if it did not. Desperation and time might be culpable to twist it, and they may come from ambition, but none of these are the evolution to love. They are still not love for love seems a citadel of its own. It may be sieged, but it will stand eternal. So what is love? Love to me is a concept that is too powerful to say this or that, for now, I say love simply is.