Love, love, love…
Valentine’s Day — a day to celebrate love. Today, I did a load of wash, made a big pot of chili, hosted a Capclave PR meeting for the current chair, wished a friend Happy Birthday, finished a book I was reading (Death’s Daughter by Amber Benson — the review will be in the March SFRevu.com), and had a couple of chocolate no-bake cookies for dessert. In a way it was a day of love. Loving what I was doing and the people I got to interact with.
While I enjoy the fact that Valentine’s Day is considered a day to celebrate love and the person we love — shouldn’t we be doing that every day. When people lose someone, they don’t regret telling that person that they love and care for them; what they regret is not letting the people they care about know how much they love them. So, why don’t we make an effort to express our love every day by treating every day and every minute as if we might not get a chance to do it over because we don’t get do overs. We may have a chance to regret or to make it up to someone but we never get to relive a day and make it better. We can however, decide that each day we’ll try harder to be the person that we wish to be.
On another tangent, what is love? We say, “I love you”. But we also say, “I love this dress”, “I love summer”, and “I love chocolate” all with the same word. But we don’t love a dress, summer, chocolate, and our spouse in the same way or even with the same intensity. It’s one of those words that mean only what we want it to mean when we say it and the hearer has to figure out what that meaning is. I think the Meatloaf “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” says:
I started swearing to my god and on my mother’s grave
That I would love you to the end of time
I swore that I would love you to the end of time!So now I’m praying for the end of time
To hurry up and arrive
Cause if I gotta spend another minute with you
I don’t think that I can really survive
I’ll never break my promise or forget my vow
But God only knows what I can do right now
I’m praying for the end of time
It’s all that I can do
Praying for the end of time, so I can end my time with you!!!
We often say what we think the other person wants to hear. How often have you hear someone wish Mister/Miss Right would come along and then say their dating Mister/Miss You-Might-Do for now? How many people get caught up in hormones and pheromones thinking that’s love when it’s just nature’s way of continuing the species? To often, people wake up to realize that it was all lust and not love. How do you tell the difference when books, movies, and TV make the two look interchangeable?
Then there’s the fact that so much of the babblings on love make it sound like it’s always goodness, light, and happily ever after. Usually, there’s no mention of the compromises, the 2 a.m. feedings, jobs, sickness, worry about whatever — that love is also a partnership, a sharing of the load — happiness and sadness, joy and sorrow, hope and despair, adventure and mishap — it’s not an even road but journey that is shared with one then the other taking the lead.
Just some more musing on biology, sociology, culture, and language.