Love

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/anwer_sher/2008/02/stronger_love_for_troubled_tim.html

Stronger Love For Troubled Times
The Current Discussion: For Valentine’s Day, this question: What is the future of love?

Although our moderators asked this question in the interest of lightening up the debate, it comes across somewhat like asking as to the future of global warming, or the future of the U.S. economy. Perhaps our approach to life, love and happiness is too stunted to consider the esoteric elements of life anymore; is it in earnestness that we have commercialized Valentine’s Day and Christmas?

I am happy to report that at the most basic level, the future of love is there to stay, though in what shape or form is a matter of conjecture when it comes to the perspectives from which we approach it. But then truly love is, in its essence, a process, composed of a myriad of passions which bring a procession of expectations, joys, laughter, intimacy and much more to our heart, with the occasional heartache, too. To a jilted lover, love then is masochistic, to a newly loved it’s a joyous moment promised forever. In either case love between humans will remain, and for as long as humankind exists. Love is without a true gender; it is in its form nothing else then the process of loving through the expression of emotions. How society becomes more tolerant will dictate the more varied expressions of love, some to the dismay of many who would oppose same-sex marriage.

Love is, in the end, the process by which you realize your best in the other person. It’s an act of giving, and even though at a societal level we are faced with more cliched hatred then ever before, there is a higher probability that at the personal level love will sustain and perhaps in these troubled times grow stronger. I hope we as humans will not forget to love. As I once wrote to my wife, in a poem:

I have stepped forward
I have capitulated
And if this love were to annihilate me

Gladly shall I be its servile servant
For a soul surrendered to love
Is better than servitude to angered aloneness.