Love ... Again

      Love is unreal, but too real as well. Although love is the most discussed and marketed subject in modern life still there is no definitive answer how love should feel or look like. Maybe it is due to the fact that every love story is unique by itself or probably because we learn through experiences and repetition what kind of love we need in our own life and who can make us feel that way.

Scientifically, love is "a chemical chain of reaction triggered in our bodies ultimately instigating the feeling of love to strike our minds. Actually, falling in love is getting into a beautiful trap set up by nature, a natural occurrence we cannot fight.  According to a science-based study by Arthur Arun, on average, the mind of a person takes between 90 seconds to 4 minutes to determine whether it is struck by love or not." As it was explained in an article in Psychopharmacology (2012).

     Despite the fact that love is predetermined by our biology and nature, most of romantic feelings and love stories are exaggerated illusions we allow to take over our lives because simply they feel good comparing to a potential rejection. Add to that, they distract our ego from unwanted endings.

Let's think about it for a second, have you ever kept thinking about someone too long and obsessed over them to find out you are deeply in love with them and justified everything they did or doing in a way that goes with the story you already wrote inside your head? Most of us did that and do that most of time. You know why, because simply we are self-centered egoistic creatures. Our ego doesnt like to feel hurt or get bruised by the truth, we all want to live on our own bed of illusions because it is comfy and safe.

     I am not debating that all love is illusion but I am certainly not saying it is a scientific truth. Love and attraction existence is a biological fact, how we get attracted, who and how is all real although sometime we don't know how to explain it or know why but it has huge biological and psychological elements to it. 

What I want to say, after we get attracted to someone and fall for them; that part is most of the time is illusion mostly because we keep feeding our ego with things we only feel by ourselves and build up a story and support it with evidence to make ourselves avoid the pain or the rejection. I am not being a cynical here, I do believe in love and I think there are so many successful love stories. But the fact they are uncommon or rare goes back to the fact that most of us fall in love for the wrong reasons, and if they fell in love for the right reasons they allow most of the time their ego to take control and lead.

     We fall in love to connect and other biological and psychological needs but let's stay with "connect" for a bit.

We fall in love to connect and this connection allows us to discover more and grow. These discoveries whether successful or not get us closer to what we really need if we were able to control our ego and eliminate the illusions from this process.

Let's be honest with ourselves that no matter what we do sometimes someone won't like us. No matter how much we give someone, sometimes they won't need us. No matter how much we care about someone, sometimes they won't feel the same. Other times, no matter how beautiful things seems to be, life will take its toll and things won't simply work. Sometimes, people have an expiration date in our life and no matter how much we appreciate all they given us they will have to depart our life because the experience they had to give us just came to an end. In many other times people do change and grew apart, not because they didn't care enough or didn't try hard. But because we are built to grow and change and that growth and change might collide with the other person but that doesn't necessarily mean failure.

Most of these experiences and feelings are hard to deal with and very heavy to digest, especially for our self-centered ego. We think about things personally and any failure or rejection must be about us, isn't it better to live in illusions to protect us from these hard feelings? And that simply what our ego does over and over again.

    Love is a wonderful experience and a magical lesson. Through falling in love we learn so much about ourselves and other people, we build beautiful connections. That help us to find better love, to get to know what we really need in romantic relationships, and most importantly (if we listen attentively) we learn how to be a better person for others and ourselves.

It doesnt matter how much you love someone today, someday you will forget about that and laugh at yourself for thinking you never can get over them. Some will stay in your heart forever and you will learn to love yourself more through that and get used to it.

But what can remain from all of this is the real thing. You should remind yourself that you are lucky to being able to love and get love back anyway, and no matter how much it hurts today it will disappear sometime. The best way to heal a wound to give it time to heal with the right conditions, if you will try to cover it too much it will only get worse. The same with the heart, experience - learn - heal. That should take you closer to your final happy destination. Life is simple yet unpredictable and uncontrollable, just like an ocean wave. The best is to take the best of it without challenging it and go with it effortlessly.

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened"

Dr. Seuss