How can we let am_Unition's comment go unremarked?
Kids: Fall in love before you're 32. Fall stupidly in love over and over again before you're 32. How else will you learn what love is, how to do it, and what you need?
Fall out of love before you're 32. Fall in love again. Explore the margins of love. Whet your love appetite. Be safe. Be dangerous.
Find your soulmate before you're 32. Then find another one.
Love isn't convenient ever.
Looking into the empty well of solitude isn't convenient either, but it has to be done. When solitude is better than a bad love relationship, you're ready for a good love relationship.
The two-body problem, the kids, the crappy mat leave in the US, aging parents, needy family: none of it is convenient.
Convenience is nice. It might even be nicer than love. Or is it?
Prayer for Revolutionary Love by Denise Levertov from The Freeing of the Dust (1975)
That a woman not ask a man to leave meaningful work to follow her.
That a man not ask a woman to leave meaningful work to follow him. That no one try to put Eros in bondage.
But that no one put a cudgel in the hands of Eros. That our loyalty to one another and our loyalty to our work
not be set in false conflict. That our love for each other give us love for each other’s work.
That our love for each other’s work give us love for one another. That our love for each other’s work give us love for one another.
That our love for each other give us love
for each other’s work. That our love for each other, if need be,
give way to absence. And the unknown. That we endure absence, if need be,
without losing our love for each other.
Without closing our doors to the unknown.I'm only 19, I have been in love twice in my life and 7 days ago had my heart broken for the first time. I just wanted to say thank you for this post, it's given me some hope that I'll love again. You've made me smile for the first time in a week and for that I am grateful.
The most important part of your blog post was a single sentence: learning to live with yourself. It's also one of the hardest things to do, probably harder than falling in love. What you see in another person is what you want to see, at least at first. What you see in yourself are your internalized criticisms and faults. Once you learn to live with yourself and live with a sense of solitude everything else will fall in place.
It's posts like these that make realize that the Western perception of love is a lot different then ours. Unfortunately I can't find any reading on it, because apparently the East is just Japan and China, and since I am neither of those two nationalities, it means jack shit to me. Then when you try to look up shit on Sudan, it's about South Sudanese poets and authors, while I know way more about the north. I guess you'll just have to trust me on this one.
I'm only speaking for myself, not the entire West. But yeah, there is a growing tendency for love to be something you grow into as you learn to live in the world, rather than a serious part of learning to live in the world within a committed relationship and a large extended family. Tell us more from your experience - you don't have to look it up. My middle eastern relatives have arranged marriages (that have been working out brilliantly). Their attitude towards love is very different from mine.
I don't think I can. I'm not very well-versed on the subject, and I get anxious when I talk about it. I have no experience. I guess I can say that my cousin told me not to get married before I turned 30. He's happy with his family and life, he just wishes he had spent more of it on himself, I guess. Sudanese people sing a lot about love, but I'm pretty sure they're just trying to forget the shitty state the country is in.
Typing this with one leg draped over the love of my life's foot on our couch, Arrested Development playing in the background, with a kitty asleep in my lap, another kitty two inches away. I didn't take my own advice, and I have no regrets. Even though the future isn't certain, the times I've had with her are better than most people can hope for in a lifetime. A cliché claim, maybe, but one I'll stand by. So... listen to lil. Love hopelessly. Feel something. Be a human, first and foremost, not a cog of society. That's how I really feel. The intended tone of my original quote is lost in plaintext. :)
I wish I had fallen in love more before I was 32. Now, I can't imagine chasing love, back then I had all the time in the world. Yes, fall in and out and up and down and right and left in love.... And then do it again.
I am always really, really confused when I read that.
You fall in love when you fall in love, so far as I am aware. You can't time it, you can't chose it, but you can try to force it to happen. Sounds entirely like a bad idea to me. Live life, make friends, talk to people, and if you meet someone you genuinely like being around, and would like to get down with, go for it. Personally, I view love as something that is an addiction. A per-programmed trap that puts us into holes while raising kids. I have, and will, avoid it at all costs. Too much drama, too much risk, too much lack of benefit. I'm happy with the internet for companionship, with friends and family to live life with, and with having a quiet home where I live on my own.
I wish I would fall in love. I have a very limited social life so that hasn't happened.
By this do you mean you haven't been in a relationship or that you haven't loved someone outside of family before? I also have a very limited social life and have never been in a relationship but I've definitely been interested in people(Does that count as love?) resists posting Haddaway song
Agreed here. I have found that love tends to come unannounced and not always at the most convenient of times, but it also has a tendency to be there right when you need it. That being said, love is an action as well as a feeling. Taking the little bit of love you start with and making it grow, nurturing to become that BIG, REAL love that you read about takes persistence and awareness ime. I think the idea of falling in and out of love on purpose isn't the kind of in love I want. Nor the type of love I have. I am in love with a girl that there is no way I could just decide to unlove. She makes me better, makes me want to be better. She makes me want to work for her to love me too, and I think she does. It's really nice to have someone that you don't just hear it when they say, "I love you." You feel it, and beyond any reasonable doubt, you believe it.
If that the route you choose to go. Granted, I know people that are really in love and also not married or planning on it. I guess it also depends on what definition of marraige you are going by here.