The word love conjures up a myriad of complex feelings. This is compounded by the many varieties of love as mentioned in the previous article. But let’s concentrate on the love that confuses, bemuses and defuses the most: love for a partner.
Most kinds of love are largely understandable, for example: love for a pet. However love for a partner has baffled us since it began (and that is another story which we will leave aside for later), baffled and fascinated in equal measure.
In English there exists the term to fall in love (I’m unsure about other languages, but I guess there is generally some equivalent phrase), but how do we fall? And when are we in love? Is it a reciprocated emotion? Is love mutual (as suggested in a comment in the previous article)? And there is also the term true love. Does this infer that there is also a false love?
As usual I have more questions than answers, so let’s just investigate as logically as is possible and see where it gets us.
You’re the only one for me! Our destiny has arrived when we meet our one perfect partner. So there’s only one? Only one person on the planet with whom it is possible to fall in love. It’s obviously nonsense.
For argument’s sake let’s consider a heterosexual scenario. A male is looking for a partner. There are 3.5 billion females on the planet. Even subtracting those unavailable it would still leave a huge number. And this is just a snapshot in time. Perhaps this male’s ideal partner is now too young, but in 10 years’ time may develop into the ideal partner. If there is only one partner with whom to fall in love then the chances of finding them are practically non-existent.
But many people do fall in love, so it follows that we can fall in love with more than one person, not just two or three, but hundreds, possibly thousands. Thus it is possible to find an ideal partner, but when there are multiple ideal partners it starts to become clear why love causes so many problems.
TBC
thiNK TWice 