Thoughts on Love.

I blogged a bit about this at one point a while back into the past, I think. If I've covered this ground already, I apologize if I bore you by doing so again.

Love is a funny thing. It can inspire wonders and things of great beauty. It can inspire horrors and things of great tragedy. Love truly is a powerful emotion, perhaps almost enough to call a force of nature. I'm not sure, as I don't know how the minds of other creatures work to say if the love or love as we humans do. It's hard enough to determine if other people love, so I'm not going to attempt to move beyond my species to understand that. And we're not even touching any theological elements, look at my other blog for that line of thought please. :)

I can't exactly do anything in half measures. Love is one of them. And I've come to recognize that we can't exactly control our emotions very well. If we're going to feel something, we can control how we respond to it and how we act with respect to the feeling, but we can't generally turn that off. Love as a very powerful emotion, is particularly difficult to mute or step away from and act with any sense of reason when you are caught in the grips of it's full force.

All of this said, we need to always remember that we can not control who or how our heart loves. I struggled with that for years. Then... somewhere along the way I realized that I was doing myself an enormous disservice and denying a huge part of myself.

It's somewhat terrifying to realize just how deeply this part of me touches the rest of my life. It is perhaps equally terrifying to realize that all those years of attempting to deny my capacity to love beyond the typical relationships of family and spouse, I was struggling to choke out something that is such an essential part of who I am.

I do love my friends as my family. There are people whom I hold in affection as deep as that which I have for my husband. There are people whom I would die for and people whom, more importantly and more challenging, whom I would live for. I don't know if that makes me polyamorous. It's confusing. I do know that the people whom I love I am loyal to as the day is long.

This makes me extremely forgiving and tolerant in areas that I wouldn't usually be so. And when I finally am pushed to where I need to act, it hurts deeply. Right now, I am hurting deeply because I had to take action against someone whom I cared for a great deal. I feel betrayed, furious, and wounded by the progression of years of mistreatment from that person. It has been quite a while since I had to distance myself, but it still hurts quite a bit. The thing that hurts the most right now, however, is realizing that they never did love me in return. And, as I work on packing up things in my home, I stumble onto items that were from that person and that served as a reminder of my affection for them.

I still do love them. But I know I can not be around them, because they have hurt me in the past and will do so in the future. This is so different from the other person who I was beginning to feel something of a deep affection for and then they hurt me. That person, I've been able to cleanly break that tie. But... the person whom I loved for years and had hurt me and broken my heart over those years... I don't know how to break that tie cleanly and I don't know what would serve to cauterize this wound.