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Stoic Fatalist Romance
This is just some musings, and I make no promises of coherency. However I have been reading/hearing about various issues friends of mine have had with their love lives, good and bad, and I have been thinking about what I think of love. I promise that statement is not as redundant as it seems.
First off, I should say that I believe in love. I believe in love as a powerful emotional comitment between two people. I believe in different kinds of love - familial, romantic, and platonic. Maybe even other kinds that I am either forgetting or I haven't been exposed to.
Secondly, though I believe that Love is a bond between two people, I don't think it is exclusive. It is possible to love more than one person, both in succession or even at the same time. I don't believe love is limited, but it is different betwen different sets of people. A loves B and C, but not the same way. It isn't necessarily a measure of quantity or quality - our socicety wants to quantify and qualify everything, to explain and limit things. I don't know if it is *possible* to do so with love, but I'm certainly not convinced it is helpful. Love, in and of itself, is not a bad thing, so why try to limit it?
I don't believe love is static. Life is fluid. People change, and emotions also change. Our socitety allows for a lot more dynamism thanpeople have been allowed in the past, and I think this fluidity explains, in part the high divorce rates and the tendancy for serial monogamy, etc. Some people love the same people for all their lives, and others don't. I think in the past people learned to live together when they were not necessarily in love anymore, because they had to. As a tangent, I also believe that you can have a happy and fulfilled life with someone that you don't love.
That said.... As some of you know, I consider myself a stoic in the old sense - I don't believe that emotions should ever be the controlling factor in thoughts, decisions, actions, etc. This is especially true of the important powerful emotios such as love. This doesn't mean that I don't think people should do things for love, but all decisions are a matter of choice, and you always have to be willing to accept the consequences of your decisions.
I don't think that love is something we necessarily choose to have or not to have, or be in, or what have you. You can't make someone love you, and you can't make yourself love someone else. But we *do* decide what to do when we love someone.
Because I think that love is good, and that we can't control it but can (and should) control ourselves, I don't believe in mourning lost love. I am not necessarily an optimist in all things - I don't always expect the best, though I do always hope for it - but I alsways do try and seek the positive side of things. Any good experience that ended was still a good experience, and I think that they should be treasured. It is better to have loved and lost, as they say. And I really believe that.
I guess that is all for now...
First off, I should say that I believe in love. I believe in love as a powerful emotional comitment between two people. I believe in different kinds of love - familial, romantic, and platonic. Maybe even other kinds that I am either forgetting or I haven't been exposed to.
Secondly, though I believe that Love is a bond between two people, I don't think it is exclusive. It is possible to love more than one person, both in succession or even at the same time. I don't believe love is limited, but it is different betwen different sets of people. A loves B and C, but not the same way. It isn't necessarily a measure of quantity or quality - our socicety wants to quantify and qualify everything, to explain and limit things. I don't know if it is *possible* to do so with love, but I'm certainly not convinced it is helpful. Love, in and of itself, is not a bad thing, so why try to limit it?
I don't believe love is static. Life is fluid. People change, and emotions also change. Our socitety allows for a lot more dynamism thanpeople have been allowed in the past, and I think this fluidity explains, in part the high divorce rates and the tendancy for serial monogamy, etc. Some people love the same people for all their lives, and others don't. I think in the past people learned to live together when they were not necessarily in love anymore, because they had to. As a tangent, I also believe that you can have a happy and fulfilled life with someone that you don't love.
That said.... As some of you know, I consider myself a stoic in the old sense - I don't believe that emotions should ever be the controlling factor in thoughts, decisions, actions, etc. This is especially true of the important powerful emotios such as love. This doesn't mean that I don't think people should do things for love, but all decisions are a matter of choice, and you always have to be willing to accept the consequences of your decisions.
I don't think that love is something we necessarily choose to have or not to have, or be in, or what have you. You can't make someone love you, and you can't make yourself love someone else. But we *do* decide what to do when we love someone.
Because I think that love is good, and that we can't control it but can (and should) control ourselves, I don't believe in mourning lost love. I am not necessarily an optimist in all things - I don't always expect the best, though I do always hope for it - but I alsways do try and seek the positive side of things. Any good experience that ended was still a good experience, and I think that they should be treasured. It is better to have loved and lost, as they say. And I really believe that.
I guess that is all for now...
Re: And Chocolate!
Re: And Chocolate!