Probably the daftest line
Hollywood ever wrote. Let’s have another one.
Teenage girl: Mom, how
do I know that what I feel for my boyfriend is true love?
Hallmark excuse for parent: If you have to ask, my dear, it isn’t. You’ll know true love when it
happens.
Bilge. Let’s be straight about this: the word ‘love’ has no
definition. If there is any such thing as ‘true love,’ it’s a rarefied concept
known only to God (whatever that is) and the odd mystic here and there. The
rest of us have to dispense with simple, fallacious certainties and accept the
reality of infinite variables.
So, may I offer this advice to the lovelorn teenager?
If you feel something so strongly for a person that the only
word big enough to fit the bill is ‘love,’ then use it. If you believe you love
somebody, you do. No one can say that what you feel as a fifteen-year-old is
any less meaningful than what a fifty-year-old might feel. The emotional root
of the feeling has nothing to do with maturity, even though what you do about
it could well be different.
The feeling might be short lived, it might go on for quite a
while, it might even last a lifetime. How long it lasts will depend on various
factors, not the least of which is the kind of person you are. It has nothing
to do with fatuous demarcation lines that people kid themselves exist between
infatuation, love and true love.
What this quality of infinite variation means, however, is
that when you say ‘I love you,’ and he/she reciprocates with the same words,
you will probably both mean something different. One person’s
understanding of an emotion is never quite the same as another’s. That’s something
you just have to live with.
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