jeffy

I was looking at the My LJ doodad and it reminded me of a comment I made on my own journal that I probably should have just posted as a separate entry. So here we are...

An anonymous commenter (who I happen to know was my lovely wife WINOLJ) said:

[In answer to the question "When do you know it's love?"] what do you mean by "It's always love"?

To which I replied:

That question just seemed to imply that love is a rare and unique event that occurs between the two perfect people rendering them an ultimate match for all eternity and if you don't have that perfect match then move along and keep looking.

That's just crazy! Every human interaction has love in it. You may not end up marrying the person you bought your lunch from, but even the mundane polite interactions of commerce have a thread of love in them. Absolute strangers both locked in cars on the freeway doing the traffic dance have a thread of love between them.

When we expand our contact, the love expands. Buy lunch from the same person each day, the thread thickens.

And that thickening doesn't cost anything. There's no law of conservation of love. It doesn't have to come from anywhere, it just comes. It isn't taken away from anywhere else. If I love the dude at the lunch counter a little more each day, I don't love my wife any less. Why should I?

It's the same fallacy as "True Love". What's that? Is there artificial love?

Like so many things, it's not an absolute. It's a continuum and a collaboration.