Love Actually
Well I just got done watching the movie Love Actually. That is one of my all-time favorite movies. I just love how the movie portrays every type of love. It could be platonic, crush, love at first site, rediscovering love, love that didn't work, just about everything this movie has. If you had a problem with love (and who hasn't), this movie is a great movie for you. But I'm not here to write a movie review. I'm here to reflect on the movie and tell you what I'm thinking. Here is what I'm thinking when the movie ended:
Love is an emotion, right? I was always led to believe that this was true. But after a little thinking tonight I might have changed my mind. Emotions are feelings, feelings are emotions, thats how I look at it. You can change your emotions. Now stay with me here, just follow me. Say you are having a crappy day, you are in a bad mood, you are feeling bad, you are having negative emotions. To cheer yourself up, you may pop in a movie that makes you laugh, or eat ice cream, whatever it is to cheer you up and get yourself out of the negative emotion that you are experiencing. You were able to change the way you feel. You had direct effect on it. It's hard to do though, you just can't flip the switch and be happy, or be sad, or mad, or any other emotion. But you can do it. You can eventually force yourself to be happy or sad. You can find a way. But with Love, you can't. You can't turn love on. You can't see someone and say "I want to love that person". It's impossible. If Love was like any other emotion then life would be easier. Think about it. There is this person that likes you and he/she seems like the perfect person for you, but you don't love that person. You just don't have those strong love emotions, the ones where you always think about the person and it is the only concern in your life. If you could turn Love on, you could make this perfect person for you your love of your life, and everything would be bliss. You could turn on that emotion that makes you wild and crazy and do the most erotic and bizarre actions you never dreamt of doing. But you can't. I'll give another example. You meet this person and you become fantastic friends with this person and eventually fall in love and all you want to do is be with this person. But this person doesn't have an agenda with you, except of just being friends. So you are left with the heartache of getting so close but coming up short. It came so close, at the tip of your fingertips, but as close as you were you couldnt have been any farther away. If you could turn love off, you wouldn't have this problem. If you could figure out someway to do something to stop loving someone, to stop gettin those feelings that come along with it and go back to friends (well the mindset of just being friends and never wondering of anything more), life would be bliss.
So what is love? If it's not a feeling or emotion (that we were always led to believe to be) what is it exactly? It's hard to comprehend, especially since we were taught since day one that emotions are what we feel, and Love is something we feel. Maybe its an emotion that its so strong that our mind cannot overtake it. This seems logic, but seems too easy for an explanation. So I'm wondering if there is a way to turn off love, or at least lessen the agony of love.
I don't know what else to write on this topic, I feel like I should write a lot more. I know people in love, and this may raise some issues with themselves, maybe doubt themselves, or not, depending on how strong they are mentally. But I just cant let my mind get so deep. Love is a tough topic to talk about, to discuss, to research. The main reason is because you have to do the research. You can't learn love. You have to learn while you go. But the thing is that when you learn it the first time, you experience the worse pain ever, and since your body is use to learning from pain, you try to stay away from it, right? You put your hand on a hot stove and you figure out that it causes a lot of pain so you never do it again, its basic extinct. So why would you allow yourself to fall back in love and experience that pain? To learn?
Actually, this may be the reason why I don't believe love is an emotion. We have experience happy, sad, mad, and tons of other emotions thousands and thousands of times. So we have mastered these emotions. Since we are learning about love, and haven't loved enough to learn a lot about it, we can't master it. But if we experience the emotion of love thousands of times, wouldn't it degrade the emotion. I remember as a little kid that something as simple as ice cream made me extremely happy, and something as small as my favorite TV program being postponed because of a silly news conference and I was very upset. Now since I've experienced thousands of different emotions and learned from them since those days, the same things dont produce the same emotions, or the degree of the emotion. It's like the emotion got watered down. For those who have experience love, ask the question to yourself "would you want a watered down version of love being the norm for youself?" I think the obvious answer is no. Therefore I can now safely conclude that love is an emotion, contrary to previous belief, but is a special kind of emotion. I wont explain it, I'll leave that up to you.
Love is an emotion, right? I was always led to believe that this was true. But after a little thinking tonight I might have changed my mind. Emotions are feelings, feelings are emotions, thats how I look at it. You can change your emotions. Now stay with me here, just follow me. Say you are having a crappy day, you are in a bad mood, you are feeling bad, you are having negative emotions. To cheer yourself up, you may pop in a movie that makes you laugh, or eat ice cream, whatever it is to cheer you up and get yourself out of the negative emotion that you are experiencing. You were able to change the way you feel. You had direct effect on it. It's hard to do though, you just can't flip the switch and be happy, or be sad, or mad, or any other emotion. But you can do it. You can eventually force yourself to be happy or sad. You can find a way. But with Love, you can't. You can't turn love on. You can't see someone and say "I want to love that person". It's impossible. If Love was like any other emotion then life would be easier. Think about it. There is this person that likes you and he/she seems like the perfect person for you, but you don't love that person. You just don't have those strong love emotions, the ones where you always think about the person and it is the only concern in your life. If you could turn Love on, you could make this perfect person for you your love of your life, and everything would be bliss. You could turn on that emotion that makes you wild and crazy and do the most erotic and bizarre actions you never dreamt of doing. But you can't. I'll give another example. You meet this person and you become fantastic friends with this person and eventually fall in love and all you want to do is be with this person. But this person doesn't have an agenda with you, except of just being friends. So you are left with the heartache of getting so close but coming up short. It came so close, at the tip of your fingertips, but as close as you were you couldnt have been any farther away. If you could turn love off, you wouldn't have this problem. If you could figure out someway to do something to stop loving someone, to stop gettin those feelings that come along with it and go back to friends (well the mindset of just being friends and never wondering of anything more), life would be bliss.
So what is love? If it's not a feeling or emotion (that we were always led to believe to be) what is it exactly? It's hard to comprehend, especially since we were taught since day one that emotions are what we feel, and Love is something we feel. Maybe its an emotion that its so strong that our mind cannot overtake it. This seems logic, but seems too easy for an explanation. So I'm wondering if there is a way to turn off love, or at least lessen the agony of love.
I don't know what else to write on this topic, I feel like I should write a lot more. I know people in love, and this may raise some issues with themselves, maybe doubt themselves, or not, depending on how strong they are mentally. But I just cant let my mind get so deep. Love is a tough topic to talk about, to discuss, to research. The main reason is because you have to do the research. You can't learn love. You have to learn while you go. But the thing is that when you learn it the first time, you experience the worse pain ever, and since your body is use to learning from pain, you try to stay away from it, right? You put your hand on a hot stove and you figure out that it causes a lot of pain so you never do it again, its basic extinct. So why would you allow yourself to fall back in love and experience that pain? To learn?
Actually, this may be the reason why I don't believe love is an emotion. We have experience happy, sad, mad, and tons of other emotions thousands and thousands of times. So we have mastered these emotions. Since we are learning about love, and haven't loved enough to learn a lot about it, we can't master it. But if we experience the emotion of love thousands of times, wouldn't it degrade the emotion. I remember as a little kid that something as simple as ice cream made me extremely happy, and something as small as my favorite TV program being postponed because of a silly news conference and I was very upset. Now since I've experienced thousands of different emotions and learned from them since those days, the same things dont produce the same emotions, or the degree of the emotion. It's like the emotion got watered down. For those who have experience love, ask the question to yourself "would you want a watered down version of love being the norm for youself?" I think the obvious answer is no. Therefore I can now safely conclude that love is an emotion, contrary to previous belief, but is a special kind of emotion. I wont explain it, I'll leave that up to you.