On Love

[Ñólendil]

I am beginning to really like the General Forum I used to only visit the Tolkien boards, but now I find myself doing just the opposite.

I thought it would be interesting if I shared some of my English work done for my senior High School's class last year. Wow, that was a badly arranged sentence.

It's just a journal entry for my English class, but I think it can be very topical. Feel free to post any thoughts about it.

There is something terribly dangerous about the interpretation of love. Love can be for one person a bitter enemy, a devoted friend, or a nonexistent entity, doomed to be not.

Love may be mistaken for love. Allow me to explain: there is love, the strong feeling one feels for an understanding companion in life, and there is Love, the ultimate feeling of devotion, the ocean of bliss we at times fall into with a soul mate. It is Love, not love, that we romanticize, that we long for when we do not have it, that we live for when we do. Yet love is personal, both True Love, and the love of friendship--I speak particularly of True Love. It may be felt by him for her, but not her for him--in which case, it may not be True after all.

Let us examine this. A young man professes to be wonderfully in Love with a young woman, but the young woman believes her love for him is only of friendship. Can they both be right? Let us assume for a moment that one is wrong--what then? If one is wrong, then who? I am convinced that if only one is right, then it is the young woman, for how can the young man be in love with her, if she is not in love with him. He is either swimming in Love with her, or he is swimming in Love alone.

Yet I wonder: can anyone swim in True Love alone? No, I no longer believe so. Did I say that Love is a personal thing? I take it back--Love is an inter-personal thing. It must--if it is true, be shared by two people; where it is felt by one, but not the other, it is powerful longing, like unto a river that may find the sea ... but may not.

The interpretation of love is dangerous because love, or Love, is easily misunderstood, mistaken, and mixed up. Love is not relative, but the theories regarding its nature are various and manifold, and most understand it not at all.

I do not claim to know True Love better than the next person, but in this writing I think I have taken a few steps closer towards realization of the truth.

I think so, because the river is mine.

Keep in mind I did not attempt to tackle ideas about love as compassion, and I do not attempt to with this thread.

Criticisms (on the content, not the writing style [which would belong in the writer's forum]) are most welcome, as well as any other ideas about what I have said here, and your ideas of love are welcome.