Being in love is feeling a friendship set on fire.
It’s a feeling that fills you with a warmth and vigor like nothing else. It makes you feel a happiness and lust for everything like you never have before. That person is now a shining beacon of everything that’s wonderful. The effect that they have on you is warm comfort in which you feel that you can weather any storm. It shows you a side of yourself that can do anything, be anything, and have anything. It’s an energy that fills you with a red hot ball of life as you’ve never known it.
Love is a sunshine that never darkens, even in your lowest moments. It’s that warmth of life that burns hot through any cold. It makes everything taste better, every song sound sweeter, and every moment filled with the hope of a new day. It picks you up before you can drop low. It’s the muse of life that makes you able to do things that you never thought possible. It’s a feeling of belonging and a lovely place to be at the end of any day. It’s a fire from within that makes you able to be what you never knew was possible.
But that’s what makes it so dangerous. Love is the single most destructive force that you’ll ever invite. In order to feel this way we have to allow it to becomes a part of us. We have to remove our armor. We have to tear down the walls that we spend years strengthening. We have to give that person the ability to meet us at our very center of being. We need to do this because being in love involves having a piece of them enter your very core so that they become part of you.
But, being in love or loved doesn’t makes someone good for you. When something goes wrong that pain now resides deep withing your very essence. Every other pain can be deflected by our armor but staved off by our walls. But not the pain of love. It’s a hurt that originates from the deepest, most vulnerable center of your being. Because that’s where it now lives.
So when they hurt you it’s destroys you from within. It harms the regions in your heart that have never felt pain before. It burns with a confusing pain of emotion in a combination that you never knew existed. And when that person finally leaves, they take with them a piece of your very happiness. Because that’s what they became to you. A part of what makes you, you. They rip it from your chest and leave you bloody and wounded.
Love means giving someone the power to hurt you and hoping that they never do. Love fills you with an intensity for life that you never knew was possible. And when it’s gone it’s burns with the exact same fire. And when it’s all over, we never open up that much again. We never trust as easily again. The burn creates a wound that deadens our senses. We callous over. With every new time we feel the pain of love we lose more of the ability to feel it.
That’s what love is. It’s the single strongest force in our lives – for better or for worse.
– Zediac
Theodore Lee is the editor of Caveman Circus. He strives for self-improvement in all areas of his life, except his candy consumption, where he remains a champion gummy worm enthusiast. When not writing about mindfulness or living in integrity, you can find him hiding giant bags of sour patch kids under the bed.