Love is...

This is a blog post about Other, sort of. We've been dating for three months now and I'm thinking about falling in love.

Sometimes I try to think about what love is and I'm never very successful. I think it's something about accepting someone as they are and caring about them and wanting the best for them. I think maybe I'm a little too selfish, a little too demanding in this regard. I want to be more than just cared about as it's convenient; I want someone to want the best for me even when it is not what they want. I want someone to be happy for my triumphs even when those triumphs make them sad for themselves.

Sometimes I am subject to emotions that make my heart feel as though it is swelling with emotion and I want to cry for all the emotion. I can only describe it as emotions. When I am I full of this emotion, I think I may be tempted to call it love, but I'm pretty sure it's not that. Affection, maybe. Longing. Gratitude. I don't know. I call it emotion. I think that perhaps that is all it is. I do not think that it is love.

When I'm trying to understand love, I think of my relationship with Roommate. Though sometimes Roommate makes my heart swell with affection and gratitude, that is not the feeling of loving Roommate. I don't think there is a feeling of loving Roommate. I think there is mostly just a knowing. We've decided that we're soulmates and best friends forever, so we are. I would do anything within reason for Roommate, and maybe even some things that are not. It would hurt and be very hard, but I think that I could love Roommate and want the best for them even if they for some reason did not love me back.

It's not really fair to compare Other to Roommate. Other has only been around for a little while and Roommate is my soulmate. I don't really know what other points of comparison  I have.

It strikes me now that it's kind of weird that I care so much about what love is. It never really mattered with Roommate. I never really thought to myself "Do I /really/ love Roommate?". Or any of my other friends for that matter. It's a lot easier to tell your friends that you love them. Maybe it's because it doesn't really matter if you do or not- it's not a milestone in your relationship.

When I first considered falling in love with Other, I thought maybe it would be a hard choice. In some sense it is, but not in the way I expected. I thought maybe it would be hard because I would have some compelling reason not to, but I don't think that I do. I think the hard part is letting it happen. Watching it happen and not knowing if it will make you happy or if it will hurt you or both. I think that either way it would be good for me. I haven't loved anyone romantically in a long time. I sometimes wondered if maybe I had forgotten how.

Sometimes Other makes my heart swell with emotion. But I am wary of Emotion. It whispers that it is what love feels like and if it is love, it will be there for a long time. But of course, Emotion is fleeting. Sometimes it is there and sometimes it is not, I know this; that is how Emotion works. But I think that when Emotion shows up a lot probably that is a good sign for lovin'.

Other told me that they love me today. I sometimes wonder what other people mean when they say they love someone. I'm sometimes afraid that their definition of love doesn't match with my definition of love. What if their definition just means that they are visited by Emotion and it tricked them into thinking Emotion was love. Of course, asking is always an option, but perhaps not always a fruitful one. I don't really have a good definition for love for myself, so who am I to judge someone else's? I think that probably it's not so important to have a definition of love in mind, as long as you made the decision to love someone. For those of you keeping score at home, I told Other that "I think I might love [them] too". This is, in a sense, a weak answer, but the most accurate. I consider myself the sort of person who doesn't throw "love"s around willy nilly but I also feel that love is not so well defined. If you're going to love someone, you should just give yourself the benefit of the doubt and settle for a weak form of love and just call your feelings love. This way, you don't need to stress too much over the exact point when you hit love and you can let your weak form grow into the stronger form you were hoping for without the stress of a label riding on it.