Love

"Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get - only what you are expecting to give - which is everything.  What you will receive in return varies.  But it really has no connection with what you give.  You give because you love and cannot help giving." - Katharine Hepburn

"Love comes when manipulation stops; when you think more about the other person than about his or her reactions to you.  When you dare to reveal yourself fully.  When you dare to be vulnerable." - Dr. Joyce Brothers

Someone told me today that there is no such thing as love.  Not the love for your children because we know that's true but love between a man and a woman.  Hmm.  That made me think.  I didn't have anything to defend my position other than "Yes there is."  Weak argument.  I never was good at debating...

I don't think I need to define love for anyone.  We've all experienced it.  Both the good and the bad faces of it.  The amazing glow that starts from inside and creeps outwards until it takes over everything around us.  The indescribable pain when it is ripped away.

I once thought that love was an intangible thing.  I didn't know you could feel it.  Really feel it with your entire being. Where that person is your first thought in the morning and your last thought at night.  When you get those little butterflies in your stomach from the littlest bit of contact whether an e-mail or a phone call.  And when you see this person, a huge smile escapes and even the most controlled of us gets a little skip in their step and imagines running together in a field of heather and falling into each others arms.  Oh, come on, I know you've done it too.  Even some of you guys.  

We all crave that feeling.  It's what constantly drives us to want more.  I'm not talking about simple attraction or sex.  That's always there.  That's easy to find and much more easy to let go.  I'm talking about the make you breathless stuff.  The feelings that are way more addictive than any drug and more elusive than a rare diamond.  You would think with 6.6 billion people on this Earth it would be easier.  I mean, that's a LOT of people.  

And if we are fortunate enough to find that love, what do we do with it?  Do we treasure it for the priceless gift that it is?  Do we put all of our energy into keeping the feeling alive?  Most of the time we do for a short time and then life starts creeping in.  We figure it's always going to be there.  And then one day we wake up and the love of our life is gone.  

So I suppose that you are wondering if I've found this thing called love.  I will say that at one point in my life I honestly had it.  The type of feeling that you would go to the ends of the Earth to keep.  The person that completely allows you to be yourself with them.  The one that you don't lose yourself with but encourages you to be even more than you could have possibly been otherwise.  The one that sees your soul and knows you even better than you know yourself.  Whether I kept it or not is another story.  Seriously.  This posting is long enough and you will just have to wait. :)