Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Lasting Love

I've been pondering a lot lately, the idea of lasting, even everlasting, love.  I always thought that once you loved someone, truly and wholly, that love never fades.  So I wonder, if you felt love for someone and then you don't, does that mean you never truly loved them in the first place?

I can easily, with no doubts in my mind or heart, say that I love the two friends I've reconnected with this year.  I have always loved them, and will always love them.  When you are apart for so many years, but never stop thinking of that person, and then you are back again in each others lives and you have the same feelings you did, yes, that is a true and lasting love.  And it warms the cockles.  I feel happy when I think of them (and others too, but right now I'm focused on this reconnection phenomenon).  I'm not talking about romantic love although I'm not sure there should be different distinctions when you talk about love.

But right now I am finding that I do not feel love for someone I thought I did.  Does it mean there never was love?  Or it was mistaken for something else?   Or is there only so much lies, deception and betrayal someone can take before they lose that love.  I thought it was true.  I thought it was whole.  I felt a connection that I couldn't really explain.  It seemed so fated for us to meet and become friends.  It seemed so right, even though everyone I knew told me it was so very wrong.  The warnings I received from so many people feel on deaf ears because I knew in my heart that we were meant to be friends, friends for life.  I ignored smaller deceptions because in the big scheme of things they didn't seem important.  But when the big pain hit, it changed things.  Things would never be the same.  Some pains are just too deep.  And while I have received an apology, twice, it doesn't change the fact that it happened and that it didn't have to happen.  It was avoidable.

I have forgiven. I have to.  I can't hold on to that type of anger. But I can't forget how it felt to have my heart ripped out of my chest.  Maybe the pain is still too fresh and that will fade too.  I've said before that I have no regrets, and I don't.  I like to think I meant something, even though it's over now.  I have to believe something positive came out of it for both of us.  But it doesn't answer the question... does love last forever?  And if it does, where is the love I once felt now?

6 comments:

  1. Excellent question. I always used to be a romantic believing that once one found love it would be true love and forever...but as I grew older I started to realise that one can have many loves, and that many of peoples loves don't last forever. This does sadden me as deep down I so still yearn for the fairy tale.

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  2. xo G...you said it all...and as for love lasting...I think that it sometimes changes form...love starts out blind, and if you begin to see things differently, perhaps it is still love, with new eyes? I don't know...I just wonder.

    hugs darling girl...

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  3. I have been to that place. Questioning the lies. What was true and what wasn't. And did he truly love me? Or was that a lie too? And why the fuck did I love him? I know for certain I loved him even though he truly didn't deserve me. I guess in the end that's all that matters. Give your heart time. It will heal. Maybe you'll forgive, maybe not, but you'll never forget. Love is real, even when it's real fucked up!

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  4. Love has different faces and the end of love has different reactions. After a major deception such as yours, it can swing in the opposite direction. Or seem to explode and disappear, or turn into something else - some emotion that isn't love anymore but is related, or become a feeling that retains the vestiges of love but is far too damaged by whatever happened to become whole again.

    One big love in my life early on (and the word "love" still sticks in my gullet) turned into such hate that it took me thirty years to get over it - if I ever did. My really great love lasted through break ups, betrayals, and trials to the end of (his) life and beyond. Why one and not the other? Who can say where and how love ends, if it ever really does, and how it affects us in the future. All I can tell you is something you already know: the sharp edges smooth with time and while the hurt may never go away completely, at least it will diminish and heal, even if it leaves a scar.

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  5. I've gotten confused myself about feeling love and then not feeling it or feeling it for more than one and many other different possibilities or combinations. Since it could get very confusing for me, I've chosen to go back the Physics. Love is Energy, and accdg to the Law of Conservation of Energy, energy does not disappear, it merely gets transformed. So yes, I prefer to think that love does last forever and although you may not feel it for the same person, it is there in your life expressed towards another or expressed in a different way. I guess the same is true for the pain and anger you feel. They are energies and they will be transformed, hopefully sooner than later. *hugs*

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  6. The short answer is...I don't know. Where does all the love go? Sometimes it becomes hate. Sometimes it just seems to vanish into thin air. I would like to think that loving someone (friend or BF) makes you a better, more human person. Even when the love goes, the memory of love makes us more human.

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