On Love, Loyalty, and Respect (part 1)

ON LOVE, LOYALTY, AND RESPECT

Treatise I
On Love,

Love is a many splintered thing. There are many types of love in this world. The love of a boy and his dog, the love of a brother to a sister, the love of a mother to a child. There is the love of child to a toy, a adult to their vehicle, and even the love of man to a machine. There is the love shared between friends, the love shared between enemies. There is the love of two people who have never met in physical reality, and the love of two people who have never even met yet believe in their minds they are united. Then there is the love of two beings involved in sexual congress. The genuine and en genuine connection denoted when two beings experience an emotional bond. Love is rumored to take on many shapes. From the one sided or uneven compulsions toward another, to mutual co-dependency, to shared joys and rapture. Love can be beautiful and wondrous to painful and empty. Those who become enamored and entranced under the effects of the emotion to the point of dramatically affecting their psyche are said to have”fallen in love”. Examine the phrase carefully. To “fall” is to move from a inclined position to a reclined or declined position. To go from being upright to prone. Meaning if you were to fall you could either possibly fall backward onto the back of your skull risking injury to ones brain, or forward risking injury to ones face. Which depending on which one you use more could cause great damage to ones life and livelihood. It has been witnessed that those who are considered in love will modify their behavior to suit the need of the object of their affections. While this may prove positive only in so log as both or all parties are in agreement and all involved remain “in love”. When one party is further “in love” than the other, the relationship can be seen clearly as uneven. Conflict arises and nothing good can come of the matter. Those in uneven relationships on both sides are prone to rash judgments and actions. Delusions of faithfulness and honesty can cause parties to have other emotions excited and dangerous tendencies awoken. It is said that love will cause one to do strange things. Persons “in love”, have been known to become violent when other wise docile. Persons “in love”, have been witnessed to go to great lengths to subdue the object of their feelings. Many wars have been fought, and many lives have been lost to this feeling. At the risk of sounding unsympathetic, I ask you first; What is a feeling? What is an emotion? Are they merely chemical responses in the brain. The stimulation of pleasure responses/ Or, the firing of random synapses in a particular region of the muscle mass known as the brain. Science claims that the same neurons excited by love are excited by chocolate. Can love be reduced to this description? Can romantic desire be equated with eating a chocolate bar? If so, then what of inhaling the ground leaf of the same plant? The nut of the Coca plant is used to make candy for young children. He rest of the plant is used primarily as nose candy for adults. Melted down and wrapped in aluminum foil you can experience the exstacy of love for pocket change. What then of the processed leaf placed on glass and inhaled through straws or dollar bills? Many intoxicated on the drug claim to experience the same euphoric highs and lows associated with those in the throws of “love”. The symptoms of love-struck individuals can easily be trade with that of some one who is said to be lost to the effects of cocaine. Humans are the only animals to experience the emotion of love. Animals of the four-legged ilk, display certain mating rituals that could be construed as love, but fall more in the category of loyalty. We as humans believe that all things big and small must be given names and descriptions. Dating back to the biblical myth of Adam naming all the inhabitants of the garden, mankind has sought to label everything he sees, hears, or feels. It is possible that through the ages certain terms have been misused and misconstrued. It is through these ill advised names we refer to our life experiences. Yet, do any of us know what love is? We have our notions, which vary from person to person depending on how one developed over ones life span. Each individual has his or her idea of what constitutes as love. Is there a true solid definition beyond the text book explanation? Can we ever truly know if love is real or simply a candy bar? Through out time mankind has written countless songs,poems, and stories trying to capture the essence of love. More often than not the authors simply capture the essence of romance. And romantic notions are a completely other examination.