期待被愛不如愛自己。

Loving one’s self is better than expecting to be loved by someone else.

What is love? Is it attention? Is it caring? Is it some kind of emotional connection? I realized that I have been looking for love or romantic feelings all my life. But what is love? When I loved someone, I thought that particular person was the last person I would love until I die. But apparently it is not true because I am not dead, yet I am out of love with that person.

If the object of love is not unchanging for eternity, there is no exclusive love. Love is the experience in a particular time and space, which the experience increases as I grow. There is an ideal of love, but the experience of love will always change. There are many exclusive experiences of love, but love is not exclusive. The object is special in the sense that the object is not universal: a person can’t just fall in love with everyone. Or is it possible?

Expecting someone to love me but I am always disappointed by that expectation. It is like wanting a cotton candy made of cloud. The cotton candy is very attractive and alluring, but the cloud disappears by the winds and it is only moisture in the air. That’s what romantic love seems to be; it is an appearance that I would like it to be real when it is not.

The romantic feeling is intimate and makes me feel that I’ve lost. I cease to exist and it makes me free. The freedom from losing my ego is why I want to be in love. When I am totally obsorbed in an activity or a relationship, I feel free from all the worries in the world and yes, good sex makes selfish people.

Perhaps I sound too rational, but I speak from my experiences of being someone falling in an out of love too easily. I would like to mention the chemical reactions in one’s body when someone is in love, but I am not as competent as I would like to be. My point is, I think love is like believing in Santa Claus: if you want to believe, then it exists. Now I start to sound pessimistic, but that is not my intention. My intention is to understand that love is a feeling from the desire of attachment.

If I don’t desire attachment, I cannot experience love. But as a human being, I desire attachment, for it is in my nature as a social animal. Therefore, I cannot avoid the experience of love. There is nothing else to be understood other than love being a natural phenomenon. I wanted to love and to be loved and thought that when there was a chance to experience romantic love, it was always worth a try because life without something to look forward to is just not fun, until I realize that I can never make myself believe. And all we have is now.