100 Thoughts on Love

1

Romantic love is the most important of all kinds of love. It is the most interesting, the one that fills us up and launches us into the heights of our art or lack thereof. Even when we think we are talking about something else, perhaps another type of love, we are still talking about romantic love. It’s our tail if we were monkeys.

2

We always seek (romantic) love. When we enter the right age, we carry our inner mission to seek it in our classrooms, neighborhoods, offices, and everywhere else. We need it. We’re always sniffing for it like dogs.

3

The will is not enough to get love. You must be an agreeable person to get another person. Love is generally a celebration of life. One does not fall in love with a sick, dying, decaying person.

4

You must do your part to get love. “Working for it” is not as necessary as “doing something about it.” Some people are luckier than others. They lift a finger and love comes pouring down from the sky like heavy rain. Other people can grow a farm full of red roses and love couldn’t give a shit.

5

Love is ultimately indefinable because it is a personal subjective experience. There is no sacred table by which we can measure if we’re already in love or not. We claim we are in love. In a way, we decide when we are in love.

6

Love at its most basic level is sexual. There must be a semblance of physical attraction to support the more nuanced areas of love. Sexual attraction is a stepping stone to reach the more advanced levels of the emotion.

7

A person is only able to rise above the mere physical when in love because society enables him to explore other features of the object of his love. Thus, for example, he can afford to fall in love with someone who lacks beauty but who is intelligent because society needs that sort of love to be more productive. Society needs intelligent people as much as it needs beautiful people. Society needs different forms of love so that different people can all hope to reach their own kind of love. Variety in love is useful to society because not all people are beautiful.

8

Love always defies our expectations in that it is never how we imagine it to be.

9

The object of your love, the other person, is not necessarily the best person you’ve met but she means so much anyway. We weigh the importance of people in our lives erratically when we’re in love.

10

We are full of errors when we are in love. We couldn’t care less.

11

Love always comes with despair. It is there lingering in every kiss, in every touch. The most sensitive of us can feel it just biding its time. We ignore it for the pleasure of the moment.

12

Lonely people are most sensitive of love’s despair or tragedy. They know life couldn’t be this good. To them, love is a vulgar trick.

13

People who’ve always had love or are more experienced in it can handle it more gently. They’re like regular drinkers of alcohol who know which bottles to touch and not to touch. They know how many glasses before they become immobile.

14

Love experts tend to take it for granted. They are alcohol drinkers who don’t go for the alcohol in front of them as much as the high that it gives them. Slowly, the alcohol disappears and there’s only the high. Love disappears and there’s only the high.

15

Love is alcohol.

16

Lonely people are so thirsty for love that the moment they become lucky and get it, it fills them up completely. Their bodies are so drained that they burst with the slightest pressure. Consequently, they die of love or they go mad.

17

The primary question when love begins between two people is how to avoid its end.

18

You expect a person who’s in love with you to like you absurdly. If you’re also in love with that person, you demand that she loves you absurdly.

19

It’s easy to write poems, songs, and other works of art when you’re in love. Art becomes you and you become art however, when you grieve for love.

20

One of the most amazing things about love is that even if you hate it so much, you can’t easily get rid of it.

21

Love is neither good nor evil. People who have a sense of righteous love are idiots.

22

Many people are able to live better when they’re in love. They eat healthily, exercise regularly, take up new creative hobbies and become better people. Despite this however, love still resembles sickness more than health. Thus, it’s easy to see the parallels between love and the flu.

23

Love is not so much about the memories as it is about the fleeting sensation that just disappeared. Love does not live in the past. It is always riding in the waves of the present. It’s the grain of sand that just slipped between your fingers. Some people may say “At least we have memories” but that is bullshit at best. You can’t remember love when it’s gone.

24

Love is not the solution. It is the ever-present problem that needs a solution.

25

Killing yourself for love is justified. It’s probably more justified than killing yourself for hunger.

26

Sex strengthens love but makes it more potentially dangerous. In a way, investing in pleasure has the risk of reaping pain.

27

Sex with love spits on any religious conception of heaven.

28

Sex is a way to conquer the other person, to reduce her to a vessel of our loneliness. The other person becomes a “thing,” a material possession even if we don’t admit it.

29

Love is never only between two people. Each party always brings a host of other people, memories, expectations, trauma, and other things that can destroy their love. It is stupid but people can’t prevent it nonetheless.

30

If you really love a person, you try not to detach her from the world she knew before she fell in love with you. Your primary concern is to preserve her.

31

Preserving the person you love means compromising, sometimes even hurting yourself.

32

True love is heroic.

33

You know that love is starting to crumble when “honor” enters the discourse. Love doesn’t care about honor or anything else aside from itself. When a person starts to keep the love because of the other person’s honor or because of her own honor, then love is leaving her behind.

34

Love is always better than loneliness, but loneliness has always been the more caring emotion. Curiously, loneliness tends to love some people.

35

Love doesn’t pop out of nowhere. The unconscious mind has the blueprint for love. Our past experiences, beliefs, ideals, even trauma, hold the key to who we can and will love.

36

If it hurts in the end, then what you felt was love. If you can let go of it so easily, then what you had was something different, perhaps a spoiled version of it.

37

Knowing how to love is the best goal you can set for yourself when you’re in love. Failure must be taken as a lesson, not a reason to ruin yourself, though that is also justified. If you can’t improve your ways, then you might eventually run out of love.

38

Pride beautifies love. Dogs can love and mate with each other too, but only humans can be proud.

39

You don’t have pride if you torture a loved one who left you. You’re pathetic, a scum, a creature who spreads guilt to make up for his inadequacies. You don’t make the world a better place and you give love a bad name.

40

Love forgives too much.

41

Love releases you from a former cage only to let you in another one. Only love has the keys and he decides if and when you’ll be free.

42

Looking back, it’s easy to see that you’re an idiot when you were in love. You wonder why at that time, you felt everything you did was rational. Love turns irrationality to rationality for a brief period of time.

43

Poems can never reflect the true state of the heart in love.

44

Similarities? Differences? Love doesn’t care about comparisons. These are merely the games we play to pin down the meaning of love. Immaterial, though. Love blossoms and decays even as you decide if two pairs of things are similar or not, even while you ponder if you’re soulmates or not.

45

Love is not necessarily pleasurable. It is a whole range of emotions that likes to disguise itself as simply “pleasurable” so you stay addicted to it.

46

Love is a majestic wild bird and our mission is to break its wings and tuck it under our pillows.

47

What a wasted life it is to not be loved by someone at all.

48

A perfectly performed love is a perfectly lived life. A person can die after that without giving a thought to heaven or hell.

49

Weird, but love letters can preserve some of the magic of love.

50

Love obliterates everything else in the world through a tight, warm hug and a long, wet kiss.

51

Love sends us into a wild goose chase for the Truth. “What is she really thinking? Is she thinking about me? Is she missing someone else?” If it were possible to dissect the other person’s mind, we would do it greedily. We know we’re going to get burned but we fly to Truth’s blazing fire anyway.

52

Love is so great, so godly that it doesn’t give a shit about Truth. In fact, the moment Truth consumes the discourse of love, that’s a sign that love is already fleeing to somewhere else.

53

Lying or deceit may be a closer ally of love than Truth.

54

We count our resources when we’re in love. We become too conscious of what we have and what we don’t have. We could almost see our resources being spent one by one. The prospect of us running out of wealth is a distant reality. We constantly ask ourselves how to replenish our resources. We want to give so much. Some give everything away. We’re like mini factories of wonders and surprises.

55

When we give something to our loved one, we actually secretly expect her to fall in love more deeply because of it. It is a stupid thought.

56

The dead air during conversations of two people in love tells so much about what kind of relationship they have.

57

Love takes cues from its environment. Two people will soon get exhausted if all they talk about is how much they love each other. Distractions and side issues do much to fuel the emotion.

58

A question begs to be asked: Do we devour each other when in love? To put it another way, do we try to consume each other until there’s nothing left?

59

Romanticism aside: Is falling in love with another person the same as having your fill of another type of food in a buffet table?

60

Isn’t it funny how we try to trap love through little rings on our fingers, signatures on sheets of paper, and fancy celebrations? Love couldn’t care less about the things we do. It’s either there or not there. It’s either staying or moving to another place. Actually, it’s always moving to another place, we just try to fool ourselves that it is staying. What stays is the ghost of love, something called “companionship.” Others prefer the term “security.”

61

Love is a universal feeling but the definition of love is each person’s secret.

62

It’s possible to understand closely how a person feels when in love, but you can never truly feel his complete emotion. Romantic stories exploit the fact that we kind of understand each other’s feelings when in love. They make you think that this is how you feel when you’re in love. Think about it. It’s not.

63

Does anybody know the point of loving? I don’t.

64

What you love is actually your interpretation of the person before you. You’re always loving a filtered image.

65

The mark of an intelligent person is the ability to not be surprised by sudden changes in the person he loves. After all, how could one know everything about the other person? Truths about the other person are gained by spending time with her. This collection of information though is a mere side effect of loving. It’s not the point of loving at all. We do not love to know everything about the other person. That itself is stupid because it’s impossible to know everything about another person. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised if the other person suddenly turns into a monster one dreadful night.

66

Anniversaries probably don’t tell anything about how much people love each other. All they say is that two people managed to describe themselves “a couple” for a relatively long period of time. “Anniversary” is just a word. The thing it represents is not necessarily love. It could represent a whole range of things, some of them beautiful, others revolting. The word “chair” doesn’t say anything about the thing it represents. We have a vague idea of what it is but the actual thing is a mystery.

67

The road to love is always more exciting than what happens after we reach the goal.

68

Love is not the strongest emotion possible. Hatred can overcome it and dismantle everything it has worked hard to build.

69

Lust can be more powerful than love. Lust though, is even more fleeting than love. Exchanging lust for love is always foolish.

70

You can best see the awesomeness of love if you know loneliness. Rich men don’t see wealth, they live normally as far as they are concerned. Poor men though, rejoice when luck gives them a portion of wealth. Lonely people rejoice when luck gives them a portion of love.

71

Should one risk everything and give all to love? It’s a hard question to answer but if you don’t, then where else do you plan to risk all and give all? To business? Bullshit. It’s way better to win in love than in anything else. It’s a million times better to lose in love than in anything else.

72

Some people actually totally, sincerely enjoy being in love. Aren’t they the luckiest people on earth?

73

Some people realize they are sadder when they’re in love. Others get depressed once love is consummated. Love is indeed surprising.

74

If you think deeper, you’ll realize that you can know more about yourself than about the other person when you’re in love. Getting immersed in the emotion is the best opportunity to explore the deepest recesses of yourself. You become aware of your fears, issues, reasons for sadness and happiness through loving another person.

75

For some, love is a training for pain endurance. Sometimes, pain itself becomes the only pleasure possible.

76

It is possible to extinguish love through over analysis. It is after all, as folks say, a battle between the heart and the mind. Push hard enough for the other side to win and it will. To put it another way, it’s possible to desensitize yourself from love.

77

Funny how many of us drink to forget about love. Alcohol tends to magnify emotions. You’re basically dooming yourself to loving more by drinking alcohol. If you really want to forget, use a drug that destroys the mind: metamphetamine.

78

Love is like the favorite son or daughter in a family. Other emotions also have their merits: sadness, hatred, pride, etc. Still, people glorify love like no other emotion. It’s as if love has a perfect shining record despite the evidence to the contrary.

79

It’s always been said that love is a very strong emotion. But isn’t love also fragile? In fact, one mistake of a person and you can immediately fall out of love for her.

80

Some people think that “I love you” simply means “I care about you.” It actually also means, “You should also care about me.”

81

Don’t feel too blessed when a person tells you that he loves you. He’s basically telling you that you’re creating chaos in his life.

82

And yet, some people think love is peace. Weird.

83

Why are we induced to say “I love you” to the person we love? What does that sort of activity really do? What is the point of that? Sometimes, I feel like it’s a way to get rid of the feeling, just get rid of it and nothing else. It really shouldn’t matter if the other person loves us or not. You can say “I love you” to a rock and it would have the same purpose – unless of course, you have other agenda. Indeed, some people say “I love you” to blame the other person and make her feel guilty.

84

If love is a kind of sickness, then is everything we do when in love simply self-treatment for us to recover our health? While the primary question when love begins is how to keep it, do our actions say otherwise? Do we really try unconsciously to get out of love once we’re in it?

85

Saying “I love you,” holding hands, kissing, hugging, having sex, giving gifts, complimenting, and having fun are all activities to externalize or actualize love. If love is alcohol, then is the act of loving a kind of detoxification?

86

Here’s a funny thought: the world is so crappy because god made it for himself. If the world was made for a goddess, as an offering, as a product of love, it would have been more beautiful. The greatest works of art are a product of romantic love. No wonder the world is so egoistic because it was made out of ego.

87

The question of power does not disappear with love. Someone’s always winning and succumbing in love.

88

I find it disturbing when two people in love become copies of each other through love. I just know that someone’s identity got raped or obliterated.

89

Love is usually wonderful.

90

Some couples actually make god “the center of their love.” What? What does god have to do with love? They could as easily make pizza the center of their love and nothing would change.

91

Love doesn’t have anything to do with trust. Trust is calculated, premeditated, and done with effort – the complete opposite of love. Love is spontaneous, generous, and effortless. Thus, if two people are in love with each other, they should just shut up about trust.

92

Talk about trust only when the other person is already falling out of love. It’s like jolting a dying patient back to life through electric shocks.

93

If you think you’re falling out of love, don’t talk. Have sex. You just need to be reminded of the pleasures of extreme closeness.

94

Love is a controlled corruption of the other person.

95

Love is a controlled corruption of yourself.

96

Movies and songs say the same things over and over again about love. Yet it’s still hard to learn a single goddamn thing from them. These are mere simplifications of love. They’re like bite-size pieces of love, like Chicken McNuggets. Love is the real actual living chicken, yet people who eat live chickens are rare – and mad.

97

We’re so immersed in a stereotypical notion of love that we’ve seen most of our actions performed by actors in a romantic movie before. The person who can love originally is worth admiring.

98

We need to simplify love to make it bearable. We need to talk about it, write familiar poems and songs about it, do the things that people in love do to simplify it. Love in its purest form is madness. We bastardize it to make it enjoyable.

99

Love is not necessarily tragic but tragic love stories are the most beautiful. Love stories that end with consummated love are winking at you with a funny face and crossed fingers.

100

Love is amazingly beautiful because it is mortal. Love passes away.