Surrender

A friend of mine recently posted on his blog:

"But in her defence none of us are allowed to choose who we would love"

I had a certain knee-jerk reaction to this statement and after discussing with him the notion of love I made more concrete my initial opinion; I disagree.

What is love? Are we able to quantify it? We can certainly experience it, receive it, give it, lose it. I can't say that love is necessarily a conscious decision one hundred percent of the time. You meet another person and in exploring who they are something unconciously or conciously clicks into place. The result is that you are willing to do more with, for, because of this other person than others you know. Your willing to put up with more, you expect to receive more.

Love doesn't always work that way. There are different kinds of love, love for a parent, love for a sibling, love for a pet, a friend, a partner. In each case we say that we love the other but the way in which we love them is different. Its my assertion that the level to which we surrender ourselves to the other is different. You may love your pet but you are still the one in control. You can love a friend but there are still parts of yourself that you withold from them, most prominently perhaps is sex. You can love your parents and siblings but you still maintain control over yourself. With a partner we tend to surrender the largest part of ourselves.

We have an ideal for what love is, how it is practiced and how it is experienced. For each of us this may be different. In reality love can be many things but hardly ever does it reach the ideal. Love can sometimes be cold and distant, pragmatic, passionate, consuming, painful, joyous. As a Christian I am most aware of 1 Corinthians 13, most commonly known of as the love chapter. If you've ever been to a wedding you are most likely familiar with its tone. For me this is the ideal but I can't say that I've ever given or received this in human terms.

When I got married I promised my wife that I would love her until we died. I made this promise before friends, family and God. When my wife leftI remember thinking that I was doomed as I would continue to love her. At some point I decided for my own happiness and sanity I could no longer continue to love her. I made a choice. In making the choice things got easier and with time she no longer clouds my thoughts or haunts my dreams.

I made a choice, a negative choice and therefore I believe that logic would dictate that the positive choice is also possible. I chose not to love and therefore it must be possible to choose to love. Sometimes that choice is just as hard.