LOVE IS LIKE ANY OTHER EMOTION

Human beings experience a number of emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, jealousy, excitement, hatred, etc. These emotions are felt by everybody throughout the world, across different cultures.

The emotion of love (romantic love) is also something that is experienced by many people and is very common all over the world. People who are in love describe it as an amazingly satisfying feeling that gives them immense happiness. Many of those who are not in love desire to experience that feeling and wait for that one special person with whom they would want to spend their entire life.

There is this delusion of true love that some people have. They take the feeling of love as the ultimate thing in life and give it the utmost importance. Because of this they orient their whole life according to this feeling of love. They have the false belief that love lasts forever and that they can live happily with that one so-called special person for the rest of their life. This belief may not necessarily be true all the time.

Just like we fall in love, we also fall out of love. This means that love does not last forever and after a certain period of time the love that we have for a person may begin to fade away and eventually die out.

There can be a number of reasons for this. One of the reasons is boredom. Human beings always like change and dislike sameness. The qualities that a person likes about his/her lover may soon become something that is routine and run of the mill. A person might get bored with being with the same person and the same old qualities of that person that were once responsible for them to fall in love with each other. Those same qualities may also even begin to irritate that person to quite an extent. This continuing for a longer period of time leads the person to ultimately fall out of love.

It is not that once the love between two people dies out it is the end of the road for them. Things can be worked out between the two. Efforts can be made by both to recreate that magic when they initially fell in love. Due to their efforts they can once again fall in love with each other and thus try to sustain the love they had for their lover. Erich Fromm used the term “standing in love” for this. He says that more than falling in love it is standing in love that is important. This is the only way that enables love to last longer.

However, standing in love is not an easy process and is something that does not happen very often. Despite that due to the delusion of true love, even when the love between them has died out, people still prefer to be with each other. The individual tries to hang on with that person desperately because he/she believes that that is the only person in the whole world who is made for him/her. This further causes problems, both within the relationship and the individuals themselves.

There are times when the couple decides to end the relationship. But since they believed that they had found true love it becomes very difficult for them to accept it. They find it really hard to get over the break up that they had. Because of this they get into phases of depression and also begin to lose interest in many other things. This can further lead to irritability and frustration.

Trying to continue a relationship that has no future or not being able to get over a broken relationship might take the person away from the possibility of accepting other pleasurable opportunities in life. There is always a possibility to fall in love again with another person, but that may not happen if the person is preoccupied with his/her own false beliefs. In this way, the person may be unknowingly moving further away from happiness that he/she may be getting. The delusion of true love and that one special person is not going to take the person any where.

The initial feeling of attraction with another person is magnetic and pulls the person into believing that he/she is in love without even thinking whether the relationship can work or not. Attraction and liking each other is not enough to have a long lasting relationship. There are many other aspects that are involved to make a relationship work out for a longer period of time. Compatibility, the amount of time that they can spend with each other, their own goals in life, and their future prospects are some of the things that needs to be considered before finally getting committed to a relationship.

It is better to withhold ones flow of emotions, initially, before getting fully committed to the relationship. All the aspects of the future of the relationship should be analyzed properly. Once a commitment is made then it becomes too late. Before getting into the relationship, if suppose an individual comes to the conclusion that there are too many complications within the relationship and that it may not have a future then he/she can always move on. Here the person saves himself/herself from a lot of troubles, like ending up with the wrong person, by wisely making a decision that the relationship may not work out.

Besides this, there is a strong possibility that the initial feeling of love may not even be love in the first place. The tremendous flow of emotions that occur when we initially meet a person and begin to like him/her, can make us falsely believe that we are falling in love with that person. Therefore, by withholding one's emotions, initially, can also make a person buy out some time and analyze properly whether or not the feeling that he/she is developing for the other person is actually love or something else. If he/she decides that it is just a liking and not love, then the individual prevents himself/herself in making a wrong decision and thus avoids further complications.

As mentioned above, there are people, especially adolescents and young adults, who orient their whole life according the feeling of love. Their whole life is guided by this one emotion. They neglect many other important aspects of life because of their feeling of love. They are willing to do anything to be with their lover.

For instance, they even choose a career path that is suitable for their love without even thinking that a career is chosen on the basis of aptitude and interest and not on the basis of their love. Choosing a wrong career for love is obviously an absolutely unwise decision, considering the fact that the love may not even last long enough. In the long run, career matters more than love.

Due to their being in love, many people give very little importance and even devalue other relationships like friends and family. Love comes and goes away, but friends and family (especially parents and siblings) are always there. Giving more value to love can make others unhappy and may lead to moving away from them. At the time when love gets over the person might end up being all alone and then it will be too late to regret.

Thus, efforts should be made to value all relationships equally. Giving more time to love and thus neglecting others can make them feel cheated and sad. There should be such an understanding between all the relationships that a comforting atmosphere is created. Giving more importance to love compared to other relationships can become dissatisfying and extremely stressful in the long run.

There is no doubt that the feeling of love is immensely pleasurable. It is indeed highly satisfying. But this does not mean that it should be given such a lot of importance. There are many other extremely important things in life, probably much more important and satisfying.

If love is given utmost importance then it leads to a lot of stress and becomes quite problematic. It can lead to dissatisfaction, depression, and a lot of complications. Love is meant to give a lot of happiness and not make the person end up in a lot of problems and make life complicated. Therefore, giving so much of importance to it is simply of no use at all.

Love should be taken like any other emotion. It should not be considered to be something that is very special. It should not be taken so seriously that it leads to self-deterioration and other problems in life. After all love is just another emotion.

The biggest problem in life is finding a meaning for it. A lot of us spend our lives distracted from pondering our eternal insignificance:

As children:We have a constant stream of immediate goals—proving ourselves mature enough to be left home alone, responsible enough to get a driver’s license, old enough to wear make-up or to shave

We struggle to acquire a driver’s license, a car, permission to date; to graduate from high school and attend college, to get a job, to get married, to have children. Then when the childhood come to an end, they consume every waking . At that point many of us suddenly find ourselves near the end of our lives with very little to show for it.

Looking back, our lives were filled with happenstance and short-range goals; suddenly even our spouses are strangers! It isn’t that our lives have suddenly become empty, it is that we have only now realized that our lives were empty all along, filled with distractions and happenstance, but devoid of any meaning or significance.

So we suffer a mid-life crisis, which consists of realizing only after half your life is gone that you never really began to live, that you squandered half your life on short-range goals and bad snap decisions that you cannot now undo.

What is the reason for this distress? Death. You see, no matter how much money you save up, someday you will die.

No matter how poor you are, someday you will die.

No matter how famous you become, someday you will die.

No matter how obscure you are, someday you will die.

No matter how chaste and pure you are, someday you will die.

No matter how well you live it up, someday you will die.

No matter how much power you have, someday you will die.

No matter how powerless and downtrodden you are, someday you will die.

It all comes down to that, doesn’t it?

Someday you will die. All the people who know you will die. Someday after that all the records of your existence will be lost and there will be no evidence that a person such as you ever existed.

Entire cultures, nations, and languages have been forgotten and lost in the sands of time: who can say that ours will not be one of them? It’s pretty distressing to think about it, so most of us bury ourselves in the concerns of our daily life to distract ourselves from the fact that we will someday die.

We whistle nervously down the path of life, we frantically immerse ourselves in activities. However, it doesn’t work: because finally, at some point in our lives, we may find ourselves in the same situation as my grandmother: very old, unable to see very well, unable to hear very well, unable to do very much with unsteady hands and fragile legs, but completely able to contemplate our mortality and the finality of our death.

The good news that the apostles brought to the world was that death is not the end. Sure, we will all die, but after that there will come a resurrection when God will judge us.

While in the past it may have seemed not to matter how we conducted our lives, it matters now, because even though we shall all die, it isn’t the end for us.

Today we are wont to say that the resurrection is a matter for blind faith, that it cannot be proved or corroborated, that it defies investigation, or that it is some sort of mystical spiritual reality. But that is not what the apostles taught.