The Experience of Love

The experience of love can be confusing and difficult to understand. One day we’re in love, and the next, we’re asking ourselves if we’re still in love. Love is fickle, and it is best enjoyed moment by moment.

The experience of love is magical, but at times, it does hurt more than anything else in the world.

Everyone needs to take a back seat in love now and then, even if we’ve been in love for all our lives.

The experience of love is not a list of pointers in a check sheet, but something that you should understand from deep within.

The experience of love

“If music be the food of love… play on…” says Shakespeare in the Twelfth Night.

If only love were like music… and could be turned on, and turned off at will!

What makes this experience of love so interesting is that we seem to have no control at all over it.

The experience of love is an emotion that we stumble into, and have to find our way. But we have real trouble when it comes to an end. It becomes hard to tear ourselves away.

Is love then like super glue? It sticks fast, and is difficult to separate? It would seem that way, and this is what makes it more of an enigma. One of the best ways to look at it is to detach ourselves from the emotional connect and to analyze it from a third person’s viewpoint.

It is always easy to give other people advice about love, or break ups. However, the problem is far more difficult to handle when it is happening to us. Here are some tips on how to handle this confusing emotion.

Enjoying the experience of love

If we compare life to a meal, where we could order what we liked from an endless menu of choices, and taste some of it like we do at Ben & Jerry’s, life would surely be a lot more interesting and a lot more varied. Then why are we socially bound to commitments and promises of eternal loyalty?

Some of it is hard wired into our genes. We have a need for certainty, just like we, paradoxically have a need for variety. It is how we use these two powerful drives that help us become successful in the arena of love. And this is the experience of love that’s glued deep within us.

The love of a mother for the child ensures that the child never has to fear not having love, especially during the formative years.

However, this too is a moving target and most mothers at some time or the other rue the fact that they gave so much, and did not get as much love in return.

Shifting loyalties and experiences in love

The shifting loyalty as we grow and evolve from relationships, of one kind to the other is what offers us the variety factor. A baby clings to the mother, and enjoys the bond with the father. As we grow up, we allow a bond to grow on us in school, with our friends or our teachers.

Then we share a bond with the opposite sex, first as a crush or what we call puppy love, as we come to terms with the magnetic power of the first love syndrome. Here we get totally engulfed and assume that this love will last forever. Then it comes crashing down, and we realize it was only an infatuation.

Many people are so scarred by this experience that they do not recover and decide instead to stay away from any relationship that they feel will break anyway, and that’s another experience of love.

Coming to terms with love

The best way to come to terms with this experience is to enjoy every moment of it, and to take it one day at a time.

Making long term plans at this stage is futile. Almost all first loves are bound to be just that, the first one.

Others will follow, and for those of us who enter the hallowed halls of marriage knowing that this will last forever, there are sometimes bigger shocks to follow. The increasing rate of divorce is reaching alarming proportions. The fast pace of life as we run the rat race in a really fast lane, trying to scamper up the corporate ladder, ensures that we pay the price of the haste-makes-waste syndrome.

Take it easy in love. And slow down. In all sense of the term.

Enjoy the experience of love like it will last forever. Life is unpredictable and no one knows what tomorrow has to offer, so why shy away from opening your heart completely and experiencing it all!