Love...then and now...

"Paint the world with your thoughts. Love with the heart of a child." -Unknown

I ran across this quote on a friends livejournal page earlier this evening and it made me start thinking. Well to say it made me "start" thinking would not be a true statement. I have been thinking about love for a while now. There are lots of reasons I have been thinking about it but the one I am going to talk about is because one of my close friends brought up the subject about a week ago.

She sent me a text in the middle of the night. I had been working that night and I didn't set my alarm right (on the replacement phone that I received) so I woke up late. I woke up to 20+ text messages and several missed phone calls. Since most of the messages were simply people asking where I was or if I was awake yet I just deleted all of my unread messages. The problem with this was that I didn't really read her message or check when it was sent. She sent a message and said she needed to explain her text from the night before...I was confused but said that we should talk. When we talked I found out that her message had said a few things and one of them was it contained the phrase, "I love you". She was freaked out and didn't want me to take it wrong. We are friends but we will never be more than friends. That is a mutual feeling and there is no problem with that on either side. She was worried that I would take it wrong since that word is not thrown around very much here in Tulsa between friends of the opposite sex.

So since then I have been thinking about love and what I think love really means. I remembered that I had once written a blog about it on myspace, so I re-posted it tonight. That was my feelings on love in 2006 and I wanted to see how much it has changed in the past two years. Since I wrote that post I have told a woman I was dating that I loved her (I don't say that very often...one reason is that I don't date very often...but still the number of women I have said "I love you" to while I was dating them is only 5), I read The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis and I have started to write a second book on the subject of Love (my first book was lost when I left NY in 2000).

I think I need to say something right here, I tell people I love them. Most of the time it is friends and family that I say it to. The reason I don't say it to a lot of women is because I know what love means to me. There is no one who I have told "I Love You" that I don't love today. Some people don't really understand that and they don't believe me, but hopefully when I am done with this post you will at least understand what I mean by that.

My definition of the word "Love" in my previous post is one that I still believe. Love is a decision based on your character for the selfless promotion of someone or something. C.S. Lewis, in his book The Four Loves, breaks down love into...you guessed it!!! 4 catagories. I know he is a much smarter man than I am so I could take some of his points and mix them into this post...but I won't. We are going to stick with the single definition and show you how I can say I still love everyone who I have ever said "I Love You" to.

If love is truly a decision and it is based on my character, then it stands to reason that I have a choice when it comes to who I love and who I don't love. I have had people tell me that they had no choice, that love just happens. I don't agree and the fact that I don't agree with that statement is usually where people tune out of the rest of my blog because all they are thinking about is the fact that you can't choose who you love!

I know that there are feelings attached to love. I also know that many people feel that affection and love are the same thing. I don't agree. The butterflies you get in your stomach, the feeling of floating on a cloud when you're around that special someone, the fact that you enjoy everything about them...all of those things can fade. You can't always choose who you are attracted to and you can't "make" yourself have feelings for someone, but you can choose who you love. I had a friend in school that I thought would be perfect to date...except I didn't have any of those feelings I listed above. She was attractive but I wasn't attracted to her. We never dated and lost touch after I graduated. I saw her again last year and I was still not attracted to her. So if you think that "love" is the feeling that you get when you meet that someone special then I agree, you can't choose who you love.

The problem with using love and affection as the same thing is that your feelings change. I didn't say your feelings "CAN" change, I said your feelings change. Love on the other hand does not have to change. I still love people who have hurt me more than anyone else in the world. I wouldn't want to spend all my time with them, I don't get butterflies in my stomach when I think about them, but I do love them. I would be there for them today if they said they needed me. Loving them was not based on what they made me feel. It was a decision that I made that I don't take lightly.

Many people say they love someone else because of how that person makes them feel. If that is how you know you love someone then once again I say you don't love them. You love yourself and you love how they make YOU feel. Love, at least in my opinion, is not concerned with how you feel but rather how the other person feels.

I made the statement the other day that divorce happens because one side or usually both sides are being selfish. That is not love...and it results in a failed marriage. You can say, now they slit up for other reasons than that, it wasn't because they were selfish! I beg to differ. If one of them cheated on the other, that person was being selfish. If they broke up because someone was lying about something, they were being selfish. You don't lie about things unless you are being selfish. It doesn't spare the other persons feelings when you lie, it spares you having to deal with the consequences of the statement. There are lots of reasons for a marriage to split up but being selfish is at the root of all of them that I have run in to so far. What does that have to do with my post on love? Everything! If you truly love that person then you will put their needs, their desires and their feelings above your own. That sounds a lot like the selfless promotion of someone...which is half of my definition for love.

There is a lot more to say...but I don't think I am going to write any more right now. Maybe another time I will go into this a bit deeper. For now I want you to think about something for me. Look at your life and those people that are in it your life right now. What are you doing to make their lives better. What are the little things that will bring a bit of joy into their life. Whatever those things are that you can think of...do them. Do them as often as you can. People matter and how we treat them matters. I didn't bring God into this post yet but remember that we have instructions to love your neighbor as yourself. If we all made a conscious effort to do that every day the world we live in would be a better place.