Love again

Perhaps not to be is to be without your being,
without your going, that cuts noon light
like a blue flower, without your passing
later through fog and stones,
without the torch you lift in your hand
that others may not see as golden,
that perhaps no one believed blossomed
the glowing origin of the rose,
without, in the end, your being, your coming
suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life,
blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze:
and it follows that I am, because you are:
it follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we:
and, because of love, you will, I will,
We will, come to be.

-Pablo Neruda

I've had a lot of trouble writing this post. As promised, I've been putting together the interviews I did. However, this has proved to be a problem as I don't want to lose the integrity or personality of the interviews but at the same time I have to keep them confidential. But I also didn't want to over-interpret them and just talk about what I think. So I've decided to paraphrase some pretty insightful things my guinea pigs, i mean interviewees, said. I hope I don't misrepresent their ideas, and hopefully someone will find them as interesting as I did. Here's some lovin!

"Falling in love is…exciting but it’s not really love at first. I think people make stuff up at first… fantasize. We fall in love with the idea of a person, not the actual person. Most the time, you don’t even know the person and yet they affect you so much emotionally. It’s all in your head, making things up." 

"The types of love are not different categories but a continuum... or simultenaity. "falling in love" or infatuation is not really different from "true love" because it is one of the same whole. You can't have true love without some infatuation and true love grows from kinds of infatuation. we just choose to continue with it."

"Friendship is always first and fundamental in love. If you can't be friends, how can you really love them? If you can't be truly open with them and to them, how do you love them?"

"This one time I tried to kiss her but she didn’t want to. I told her I’d wait however long it took for her to kiss me. And that’s when I realized, crap, I’m in love with this girl. I would have waited for her for anything"

"people stay together because they put the other person before themselves. culture, human nature – we’re brought up to think love is the ultimate thing but really the other person is the ultimate thing. I struggle with that… society’s ideas make me crazy for someone for no reason. It makes real love harder because we’re searching for the wrong thing."

"I don’t know if I’ve ever been in love. I’ve never had the chance"

"It's a give and take. Kind of like work: if you work really hard on something, you love it. Work hard on your relationships and you will love them. Like... you're beautiful because I love you, not I love you because you're beautiful"

"Checklists of qualities you're looking for in a partner are stupid. Give everyone a chance. Even if you think you know what you like, you probably don't. People are very malleable."

"Love is a choice. It's commitment. Arranged marriages are such a good idea!  They immediately require commitment, which is something we are not very eager to give..."

"Maybe inherently we have sets of qualities we look for but they dont explicitely play a role in my experiences. I don't know everything. I don't know who i'm going to fall in love with or when or how but i know it happens. I want to be open to that and open to other people and not limit myself to people who only share my interests. "

"At first, I said I love you because I was caught up in the excitement and in him. The point I really realized I loved him was when I wanted to change my life for him. I was looking to change schools and realized I would change almost anything for him."

"You can tell other people are in love by the way they look at each other and what they do together. Like a couple walking, holding hands and actually looking at each other and talking to each other, doing mundane things together.. like a team."

"I'm not really sure what love is... But I know what I've experienced. That's enough for me"