Guinea Pig

I’ve been thinking about love lately, mostly about the nature of love. I have lots of love for my friends and family and been in love three times, but I don’t really know much about the elusive feeling. Is love about yourself or your beloved? Do you really helplessly fall in love or is it a choice based on conscious or unconscious influences all around you? Why do you fall in love with one person and not another? Is love about passion, commonalities or even biology? Can you stop loving someone? Does love really exist or is it just a name we give a complex mixture of hormones, chemicals and nerve endings?

Each time I’ve been in love it has been unique, which makes sense because they were all with different individuals. The feelings range from intense passion to warm fuzzies to frustrating discomfort to absolute heartbreak, but it’s always felt right to call it love. One was adolescent naïveté, the next was an instant smack in the face and the last one kind of crept up on me by surprise. None of them worked out.

I crave understanding more than anything else, but I’m not sure I’m going to ever understand love. I do want to understand myself, so I’m going to do a little experiment for my own comprehension. I’m going to ask myself these questions: What is love to me? How do I want to love? How should I express it in my life? How has my history affected my ability to love? How can I answer the questions in the first paragraph? Is my love good?

I think I’m going to write a play about this.