Wednesday 23 November 2011

'Love is Never Having to Say You're Sorry.'

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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