If all the words that have been written about love since mankind first put sticks to clay were laid end to end, they would rocket past Venus and disapear into space. Histories of love, philosophies of love, pyscologies of love, guidbooks to love, love letters, love songs, love stories, love poems have covered tablets & papyrus, parchment & paper & walls. Love is now and always has been, and ever shall be our scourge & balm, our wound & salve, source of our finest and most bestial <BR>actions, the emotion that passeth all understanding. Love transforms us into something strange and rare, it ignightes our lives and dying takes all meaning away. <BR>We die of love & die without it, our hearts beat for it & break for it. Love built the Taj Mahal, wrote the song of solomon and cooked a billion meals, everyday across <BR>the world. Or so they say. Take off the rose covered glasses and what does a close examination of the facts reveal? That Love, true love, is the rarest of all emotions, and is most conspicuous only by it's absence. How is that possible with all the stories & songs and poems...I love, therefore I am. But is it Love they feel? I think not. <BR>The word is an vast umbrella for multitude of virtues and sins and because we are perfectly familier with all of loves precursors and understudies, we imagine we <BR>have pinned down love itself when we have merely trapped it's shadow. Co-operation, for instance, you scratch my back, i'll scratch yours. Sex, a powerhouse sometimes so overwhemling in it's assault apon us we give it the prettier name of "Love". We know about affection and friendship. We feel liking, duty, deference, greed, lust, ambition, attraction, protectivness, ingraciation and the desire to conform. We are gripped by infatuation, obsession, adoration, vanity, addiction, jealousy, fear, and the dread of being alone. very deeply, we know about need. But love is something else, and people have an ever slimmer chance of creating it the more restrictions and rules we create for it's "growth". Many of those who offer the longevity of their marriage as proof of enduring love are often only revealing their own endurence in the face of ravaging compromises and a resulting anaesthesia that has left the half dead. In the name of love they have forsaken every grace consitered adimrable in every other part or act in life: honesty, dignity, self-respect, courtesy, kindness, integrity, steadfastness of priciples. They have not been true to themselves and therefore they are false to everyone else. including their children. What would never be permitted to strangers is given a free licence under love- <BR>abuse, insults, petty degeneration, physical attack, intrustion on personal privecy, destruction of personal beliefs, desruction of other friendships, destruction of sex <BR>itself. In order to enter the Kingdom of love they have shrunk themselves to a space of less than one, atrophied in every part, they claim loves crown. If love takes any other form other than this tight, monogamus, heterosexual, lifelong reproductive unit blessed by law, the state, the priests, and sanctioned by gods, it is dismissed as an abberation, hounded as a perversion, insulted as a failure and refused the lable "Love". The incredable shrinking couple is presented to the world as the central aim and reward in life, a holy grail for which it is never to early to begin searching. We have called other emotions love and they do not smell as sweet. <BR> I'm looking for an angel <BR> to sing my love songs to <BR> untill the day that one comes along <BR> I'll string along with you. <P>Thanks ever so much, but no thank you. Love used in a romantic or passionet context only, is merely a licence for indugence of our own needs and fantisies, a prop for our shaky ego's. True love is, above all, an emanation of reason; a rational apprehention of another human being and a logical assessment of his or her particular needs, virtues and failings in the light of reality. <BR>We must leave adolesense behind and grow up. It is absolutely vital if we are to continue to exsist in some comfort apon this earth, that we take a giant step into true aduldhood, learn to filter the emotions through our reasoning capacities and learn that survivel itself rests on knowing who we are and respecting other's space and endeavoring justly to balance our own and others' needs. As adults we are responsible for our own needs just as we are our own hygine, finances, and all aspects of our lives. We are not infants waiting for someone to figure out that we need our diaper changed. When we know who we are and are confident in our ability to meet our own needs, we can love without fear and real love can truly blossom. With a real sense of where <BR>we differ and where we are the same, we can respect ourselves for who we are and we will not be succeptable to the easy flattery of a passing stranger to make us feel real. No plots, no plans, no tricks, no gimmicks. A little less "love" and a little more common decency please!<P>
