Love

[Drew Ott]

Well gentlemen, this thread really helped me during the ridiculous month of December. Thank you all for the advice and support.

I've learned that I'm prone to weird infatuations. I'm not sure what brings them about in me. Usually I am very in control of my passions, but sometimes something strikes me and I revert to my childhood idealism, my black-and-white thinking, and my belief that my sheer force of will can overcome the laws of nature.

Do I believe in love? Sure, but with many reservations.

I read a great, forgotten book called "Love Can Be Found" by a once well-known psychiatrist named Silvano Arieti. In it, Arieti claims that romantic love is the sum of many smaller loves-- love of parents, love of work, love of community, love of life, love of God, love of the future. This makes a lot of sense to me. In the end of the book, there's a beautiful passage about how love might be the same thing as the anti-entropic force of the universe. I won't spoil it.

I find that life is just so damn strange. It doesn't make any sense. I can't control the future, and I can't even maintain stable opinions about the past. What next?

 

[Batutta]

Love is a feeling. It defies any attempt to intellectualize it or quantify it. The first time I held my wife I literally felt a burst of warmth explode from the middle of my chest. Was that love? I don't know, all I know is I couldn't explain it. We've been together for twenty years now.