"What's Love got to do with it?" or October Wild Card (by: Bob)

October Wildcard:

For starters, let me just say that I feel the paralysis of limitless choice. A little sliver of that circumstance that you might have felt, too, when standing in the toothpaste aisle of the Super ShopRite with no coupons, sales, or preferences to guide you. Which one to choose??? Paralysis sets in. Suddenly my quick trip to the grocery store ends up with the beleaguered staff escorting me to the checkout counter with the stink eye because they’d really like to go home.

Just sayin’, love is a fairly broad topic. I’m gonna given it my best shot, amiga.

Here goes:

To be open to the real possibility of love, maybe we also need to be open to the real possibility that love does not exist. Consider if you will for a bit that love is dead. Or that it never existed at all, except that we needed to name the filling of a need, or the fulfilling of a fantasy, so we developed this construct called love. For all of the evolutionary benefits that the love-construct brings us, it make sense that over millennia of human existence we have taken the blend of belonging, deep attachment, ecstasy,  and affection and held it up as the pinnacle of all human emotion.

Maybe give yourself a deep moment, if you never have, to just imagine that love is not real. Just take that word out of the times and circumstances that you are accustomed to using it, and replace it with another for the various relationships, circumstances, and events that we had heretofore labeled ‘love.’

If, in meditation on this question, we might allow ourselves to descend into the depth of the thought that love does not exist, we might there posit a suggestion that would have us examine the question: so what? What is love really good for? What function does it or could it serve? In substitution, what other words or ideas reflect another aspect of thing that we might have called ‘love’ – that we might enjoy, or find elusive, or take for granted. Consistency? Interdependence? Euphoria? It has occurred to me that these other names for the generic ‘love’ might be more useful in understanding what it is that any of us is really seeking, or missing, or grateful for. So then, naming it differently, what is the thing that we like, or need more of, or need to experience differently in our lives?

 So, Shannon, when you write about saying "I love you", the challenges of partnering, and really "letting someone in" -- maybe it would clarify things to think about these areas in terms other than love, and to really sit and understand the things that lie behind the term. Alternatively, all this mucky-muck of mine might be crap, too, so feel free to ditch it all and ignore me, and just be your blissful self.

I really do believe that within each of us lies the capacity for the entire gamut of human experience and reaction, given the right circumstances.It’s too “heady” way to approach this topic, right? Bah, humbug! One might argue that this is an over-intellectualization of emotion, but I must say that have never believed in the heart, per se -- i.e., it has never made sense to me to tease out thoughts from emotions as though they were generated from various organs within us. Who’s to say that our thoughts about our feelings, and the biochemical substrate that underlies them all, is able to be parsed out from each other?

This is not to say that love is not real – or, more precisely, that there is a very real thing that we experience, and that the lack of it is not good for us. The ache of a broken heart is certainly as real a physiologic process as any, and it can indeed even kill us (google “takotsubo cardiomyopathy” if you don’t believe me! I had to get something nursey in there!)

Anyway, I LOVE this project, and LOVE your openness and willingness to invent yourself anew. Really. LOVE IT!! Besides, you can’t call me a Wildcard and have me not attempt to deliver on the name, right?