So, okay: "I love you."
"Why do you love me?" they always eventually ask.
And how do we respond? We start listing off the things we love about them. Their hair. Their smile. The way they talk and move and think and their philosophies on life. The scent of them when they lay next to you. How they make love. The cute little thing their nose does. Their ambitions. The conversation. But then, aren't those just the essences that hook you and altogether form an emotion in you that manifests into love itself? When you say you love the food you're eating and someone goes, "Why?" You say, "'Cause it just...tastes great!" Not, "'Cause I love the brand of the spatula the chef used and the burlap sack the spices came in. And goodness, don't get me started on the mustache of the waiter who brought this dish to me. Let alone the quality of grand cherry oak of the table we're sitting at." Details like those are trivial as to why you enjoy what you're eating, aren't they? Not that hair and smiles and eyes and personality are petty issues when it comes to being in love with someone. But they're simply the ingredients of your love. Part of the recipe. Not the dish itself.
There's something more to a person's mind singling out one particular individual and deciding that he or she has the qualities - good and bad - that you can exist with for the rest of your life. And it's not their hair or smile or eyes. Or their laughter. In a world of seven billion people, someone else always has a better body, a quicker mind, more money or owns a deeper mystery; whatever your fetish. And we're all different combinations and intensities of the same traits.
So the only thing I can come up with is this: It''s how they make you feel.
When someone makes you feel good, you enjoy that. We're humans. Selfish beings. Animals. As living beings, we all enjoy pleasurable sensations. Be it laughter, physical, eating, gratitude, enlightenment, etc. When we connect with someone on that new level, they make us feel good. We enjoy how they make us react and think inside. But what is that, exactly? A hundred people could come up to you and say hi, but there's always some person who when they greet you, there's electricity. You hope they say more than just "hi" to you. Your eyes follow and watch them long after they speak to you. Why? Physical attraction. Let's be honest: You won't ever "be" with another person unless your physically attracted to them on some level. We're all superficial like that. All animals are. Why do you think male peacocks have all those feathers? Or why sick lions never have mates? Or why the lobster with the biggest pincers win the female and birds decorate their nests with the brightest shells and rocks? To catch the eye. Instant physical gratification. We have to be horny to mate. We have to mate to procreate. We have to procreate to survive. And survival is the most basic and primal instinct of all. From amoebas to zebras, balls to bones, we all have sex to live.
So what does this have to do with love? Well, we tend to connect the emotion of love to sex itself. (And those who don't and have meaningless sex always end up feeling alone and empty eventually, weeks or years later. But those who make love inside of and for the reason of love itself, live happier.) We enjoy the security of having a mate. There's something about this ethereal sense of "love" that heightens sex in general. It's even called, "Lovemaking." But how can this "love" be something tangible when at one point it never existed? When exactly did man either create or became aware of the emotion of Love?
Caveman days? When the hairy Cro-Magnon would drag his club and knuckle over to a female with and heave it over her head rendering her unconscious so he could drag her back to the cave? No. No, love didn't exist back then. Or rather, our modern definition of love didn't. So which society/era of humans came up with love first? Who was the first human being to feel that emotion when he first looked at a woman and felt something no one in the history of mankind had felt before? There had to have been a first moment. That very first instant when love happened. I mean, right? After all, somewhere along the line of man, one person's mind gave birth to love itself. But does anyone know who he was?
My guess is the renaissance was around the first time true love was realized and diagnosed (as in what they do to diseases and viruses.). The male has always been the dominant half of the human spieces for generalization's sake, both in physicality and privileges. But no more important than women, biologically speaking, which makes how women were treated for centuries extremely disheartening. Regardless, that's my hypothesis. Modern love was invented/discovered during the renaissance. It had to be. The prior civilizations had twisted views on love. Or perhaps our way of definition is twisted now.
But that doesn't mean I'm right. Did love existed back even before the Aztecs and the Ming Dynasty and it's simply evolved through societies? That would make love the most resilient and versatile of all emotions; hate and joy and sadness and humor have never strayed from their original foundations. Cavemen laughed. Indians cried. Gods of lore were all based upon revenge. But Love is relatively new to humans. I guess that's why is still such a mystery to us.
When you love someone, you just...do. All those things you list off about them are simply the things that brought you to them and gave your heart the recipe it needed to create love. There's is no explanation why. Just a how. And it's the "why" we love someone that keeps us always going back for more.
I've essentially said nothing and circled back around to where I started, but no less curious.
Huh.
Maybe that's love.
-HKR
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