I didn’t really give too much thought before typing this but I thought it would be interesting to write about, and I’m bored and putting off reading, a project, and generally killing time.
A question was asked of me recently whether or not love between two people ever existed in the first place if these two people were in a serious relationship and then split.
I think its always important to weigh certain factors in things of this nature – fidelity for one. But lets presume there was no infedelity and two people who had claimed to love each other split.
The hardest part about this question is that love can’t really be defined. Some people say they find their soul mate and being with them is the only thing they can ever picture themself doing – yet this is rare. More typically people define love as a goal between two parties attracted to each other initially by appearance and conversation, or mental attraction if you will.
I feel like love is completely subjective. Everyone probably has their own ideas about it and are expecting it through the course of certain situations. What’s interesting is that poeple say “you just know” when you’re in love a lot. This is an interesting concept because it requires trusting one’s own judgement about their current situation. People can typically convince themselves of anything, I doubt love would be any different.
So say you convince yourself in love, you really “know it” when in fact you aren’t. Obviously in this situation love would not have occurred in the first place…or would it? Humans create things in their minds every day, plans, schemes, plots, music, and these things exist for a certain point in time in an untangible form, floating about in their bits of brain matter. I think its quite possible love can be created – in fact, chances are the person who created this love is not the one who would eventually do the splitting up – it’d be the other person. So here love would exist but not necessarily between both parties.
But what if you constantly doubt yourself? In this particular scenario you’d be doubting ever being in love, not be in the right situation for it or at the right time in your life, and you could entirely be in love but not really realize it until after the tragic split. Here love would have existed in the first place, and it continues to exist most likely for a certain period of time.
Finally there are those people who just fall face down in a puddle of love and never look back. Chances are they won’t split so the question can’t really apply here.
Here are my thoughts on the matter. If you actually do convince yourself you’re in love, then love exists because you’ve created it. Whether the love is shared is another story. If you don’t believe yourself to be in love, then realize it later, obviously the love existed at some point in time. Now in both of these situations it IS possible that both parties do not feel the same way. So a shared love would be non-existent, but love itself may have been fostered by one of the parties and therefore existed, or still exists, to that person.