I needed to write this crap down. It'll probably be terrible when I reread it in the morning, but for now, here's some thoughts I've had about love and other weird sciences.
I believe in love.
It sounds cliche and kind of stupid, but it's true. I'm a hopeless romantic, no way around that, though I think I tend to mislead people because of my personal lifestyle choices and opinions on sex. I don't believe that sex is necessary for love, because love is supposed to be about a person. It's about identity, what makes us human, who we are, and how we can identify with someone else on a level that no one else can. Love is about trust and hope and frustration, delirium, desire and wanting in more than just a physical sense. Sex makes us alive, but love gives us life, and a reason to live. People are people because we can love, because we're given the ability to see each other beyond the physical entities we are granted.
I believe that love defines our existence. We cannot hate without love; it's an age old requisite that you cannot know something without having something else to compare it to. White is white because black exists, because it is necessary to differentiate between the two. It makes me think of that woman in Donnie Darko, the teacher that taught the two sides of life, the light and the dark, the love and the hate. Donnie was right; you can't just define life like that, divided into two parts. There really is an entire spectrum of emotions that aren't balanced somewhere on the line between love and hate, but I can't help but to admit that there was something going on there. Within the spectrum of love exists frustration, need, stupidity, helplessness, and desperation. These are things that people can't possibly call "positive," and when defining moral standards on a line between love and hate, these emotions don't really have a place. The idea of "love" versus "hate" is purely two dimensional, but there is more to life than that. There isn't just black and white- there are shades of gray mixed in, the muddled area where you might be just in the middle of these ideas. Go a step further and presume color. Color cannot exist in a mere spectrum of grays; it goes beyond, delving into lights and darks and mingling as the grays do, but with something more there. A third dimension. This is the same with emotion. There isn't just love and hate, but all these other intense feelings mixed in that have different levels of positivity and negativity. These create the third dimension of feeling, and bring the concept of emotion into our plane of existence. It breathes life into us and gives us the ability to know what love is, to know when we are in it, and how deeply.
But people don't live in just three dimensions. We live in four, maybe even five or more, dragging ourselves through time and space. We create, we change, and we experience something new with every passing moment. Where is the fourth dimension in the spectrum of emotion? Does it exist? The fourth dimension is invisible; it's the concept of time and the movement through it that we make. As such, how can one prove the existence of something that can't be seen?
The proof lies in the fact that we as humans can identify with the emotional spectrum. Because we know the existence of all these different emotions - because we have experienced them for ourselves - proves the existence of the fourth dimension. Being able to navigate along the emotional spectrum, differentiating between the anger (jealousy) felt out of love and the anger (retributional) felt out of hate, shows this. People are not eternally stuck in a constant state of depression or desire; they move from level to level as things change around them. This is how we know that love exists. This is how we know that someone is human- because they are capable of loving and of hating, and they are able to move through the emotional spectrum as time passes.
Why is love such an integral part of our lives? Why do we spend our whole lives searching for someone who sees us as we see ourselves, hoping we can do the same of them? Do we desire so much for tangible acknowledgment of acceptance that we're willing to spend a third of our natural lives or more searching for one person who will tell us that we're perfect just as we are?
To be honest, I admire those that can give their lives to their God. To be able to live contentedly without the touch of another, without a hug that's more than friendly or a kiss that's more than a peck shows so much dedication, so much love for someone they can't see and aren't guaranteed to ever see. I wonder how often they cry when alone at night, wishing for the arms of the one they love most to envelop them and thank them for the love they have given back.
It's not perfect, but nothing is, really. There's no such thing as a happy ending- there's always something that comes next, but I think the truth is, we're content to ignore what may happen given that our lives in the now are fulfilled. And those of us that find the present lacking? We're dreamers. Distracted, desperate dreamers that might someday come up with the determination to say what's on our minds. But for now, there's a future of potential waiting to be imagined, and every single one of you are in it.