I wonder about how and why people fall in love with each other.
It seems to me that, more often than not, the reasons why one person falls in love with another person are more about him/herself than the other person.
I think that this speaks, very much, to what real love is and what it is not. Many people “love” other people because of themselves, because of something they need, or lack, or crave, or want, and, in reality, it is not about the person they supposedly love, but themselves.
This is the issue of real love; for real love is not about the self who loves, but about the loved, and, to be more accurate, about the loving. It is directional in nature—real love goes outward, and not-real love goes inward, not-real love is about the lover, not the loved.
I think that real and true love is when both people can love going outward and they do not love for themselves, or to fill a gap, or a place or something, or to get something, but simply because they love and cannot do otherwise. People who are controlled by their illusions, “issues,” desires, and assorted baggage, feel as if they cannot help it, but they really can. Real love is not desire.
I think of this topic again while reading A Farewell to Arms, wondering how they could really love each other when they do not even really know each other (let alone themselves), and it made me think about all the love stories where I simply didn’t buy it. It makes me wonder about the complexity of other people’s loves, even though I do think that most people are incapable of real, selfless love; or if they do feel it, they do not know what it is, and do not know what to do with it, do not understand it, cannot understand it, because they are too ego-bound, too self-involved to experience it in a context of truth. They may feel a bit of selfless love, but because they live such illusion-based existences, that love is smothered and appropriated by illusory, selfish love; it is distorted and unable to be expressed truly and honestly, for it is not even really known and understood as it really is, for it cannot be by one who is so lost.
Again: Self precludes love.
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From my personal notes, 7/12/00
