About Love

As De Botton says, 'love is the pursuit, in others, of qualities we find lacking in ourselves'. I can't help but agree with him. I have always fallen in love with women who display a certain kindness and generosity, which I lack completely. Women I have loved, most of them at least, have often displayed that warmth which lightens your day. It is also something I have never known how to exude, and haven't even by mistake. I am comparatively cold, and in a sense selfish.

One may wonder whether a continuous awareness of these differences wears out love and makes it painful. And whether it is better to be with someone whose qualities you share, and can participate with in those meaningful moments. Perhaps love deserves certain comforts, which it shouldn't be denied. Perhaps love deserves a certain like-minded reciprocation, which can leave in balance, our sense of fairness. But I have a strange feeling, that these are mere excuses and denials. We truly love him or her who reminds us of the wonderful things we are not.

The unfairness, the loneliness, the misunderstandings are an important part of love. They constitute it, in a sense.

Interestingly, a lifetime's love may be encapsulated in a few moments. Like a fluttering strand of hair, beating about the temple, by a window of a prosaic evening, which suddenly fills you with a yearning for that soul, love resides in these completely irrational sensations, in these lost moments, which often pass, without us even knowing they were there. Or during a journey by unending roads, when the short-lived surroundings makes us look more carefully at the person next to us. At the back of our minds, love is captured in these youthful evenings, around the halt in the conversation, between the silent sighs, as our hearts connect ever so gently.

Most people try to stretch these moments into a lifetime. Or try to rediscover them again and again, to keep alive what nature gave to us. I think that perhaps we would be better off if we tried, in our own little ways, to feel what it was about those moments that they embroidered themselves in our hearts. When the novelty of love wears off, we are left with a yearning for those initial magical moments. Moments when we suddenly felt the tenderness and beauty love brings with it.

Love comes with an awareness of defeat.