OCTOBER

10/1/21

I hear much about love. I think about it often so it's easy to notice. I don't know anything about love. I don't understand love. I've never been in love. Not really. I have nothing at all to base it on, but I know that it is a feeling that drives people to write and talk about it a lot.

I speak specifically of (1) flowery romantic poetry presenting vignettes that are interwoven with love, or metaphorical descriptions of how love makes you feel (2) and the same two kinds of writing, but about the pain of unfortunate love or heartbreak, and so on. The good and bad aspects of love. I have no frame of reference besides these descriptions, because I have no experience with love, so I probably have a half-baked at best, and completely misguided at worst, idea of what love really feels like. I can imagine such vignettes myself, and I can picture how certain events would vaguely make me feel when I did them with an imagined person I feel "love" towards. I can even imagine the possibility of really opening up to someone I love, and being vulnerable around them, and feeling intense unpleasant emotions from that trust being broken, or the relationship falling apart in some other way. That's all love. I'm not so confused about those aspects of love. I can imagine all this doing and feeling. But who do I project this doing and feeling on?

Everyone in love is in love with someone. But why that person in particular? What makes this one person so interesting? Is love an instant thing? Do you know immediately that THIS person is the one that you are inexplicably in love with? Does the relationship build up over time? I think I understand friendship. The more you want to spend time or energy with someone, the better friends you are, probably. But when does it cross over from friendship to some kind of love? What makes love happen? Why do people fall in love and why with certain people? I would understand if people all were simply willing to give a shot at love with certain people and decide from there whether it feels right or not. Or is that already what happens?

I'm on the outside looking in, but I have nothing to look in to. I hear about love and have never witnessed any part of it myself. I haven't been able to pick apart someone's brain who is in a romantic relationship. It would certainly be an awkward conversation to have, anyway. In my mind, I imagine picking at someone's relationship and all my picking causes the relationship to fall apart. That is unlikely, but still I won't. (In fact, I often imagining asking someone how they do something, causing them to think too hard about it and be unable to do it as well anymore.) I have never been in love. I've never even entertained the possibility of one person being more suitable for a romantic partner than someone else. I don't know what would make someone suitable. Trust? Intimacy? Mutual affection? I suspect these three things are the basic necessities.

But HOW does one person elicit love from you? I consider anyone at all to be a potential romantic partner. We "try" dating and work it out from there, and see if things work. That's the best I can imagine. Why don't I randomly fall in love with people? Other people do. I think. Falling in love with a friend is, supposedly, awkward, but at least I would know then what it feels like.