I'm giving a talk later this week entitled, Love, Unexplained. While looking through my online notes, I found this list. I've no idea when I wrote it, but thought I'd share it here.
1. Love is irrational. It has no logic, nor reasoning. It makes no sense and trying to make sense of it is futile.
2. Love affects all five aspects of health. Physically, your heart will race, breathing intensify, and face flush. You may smile, giggle, or laugh without notice. Mentally, your thinking will be cloudy one minute and crystal clear the next. Your mind will reach a level of creativity higher than before you loved. Emotionally you may lose a great deal of control over moods. Panic, giddiness, and moments of profound awareness will become the norm when you feel true love. Socially you may be gregarious one minute and isolated the next. You will experience intense confidence and anxiety about being without those you love. Spiritually, you will discover new planes of understanding that one purpose of life is to be someone special to someone special. You will realize the reality of interconnectedness.
3. Love may be romantic, platonic, sensual, sexual, intellectual, or physical--or--most likely a combination of two or more of these states. Team mates may have as much intense love between or among them as do loving sexual partners (see #1). In intense moments of friendship, you should give in to your urge to hug. Loving moments should not be squelched.
4. Love is moody. It is the perfect long hot shower, but it is also the too-tight scratchy-bothersome-tag-in-the-back-of-the-collar wool sweater. It takes your undivided attention, but also may turn its back on you.
5. Full on love has no concern about your practical obligations. It hides your watch and clocks; it makes you forget about the coffee maker; in the the throes of a loving relationship you may arrive to a destination to which you've driven and have no recollection of how you got there.
6. True love weathers storms. True love may endure high winds, rough waters, and flashes of lightning. True love always finds the sunshine...eventually.
7. Genuine love endures. But its intensity--like the moon phases--may be full, waning and waxing. Aspects of love are many--love is full but over time you will experience it in all of its subtleties and intensities.
8. True, deep, genuine love is profoundly patient. It allows as much time as one needs to make a decision. It is constant. The best friend you had in college, if truly a loving friendship, will welcome a phone call 30 years later and realize the comfort of being truly known and understood by another.
9. True love allows for growth, including clumsiness and mistakes. Best friends and lovers respect the need for each person to have room in life to grow, gain independence, and hold on to the comfort of love. Love is not clingy, but it is fully present and supportive.
10. True love is ever-present. Many people fear true love because it requires each of us to be vulnerable, open, and intensely honest. All of those states of being may leave us fearful. Crossing the chasm of fear is a necessary and liberating step toward experiencing truly loving relationships.
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