“What Is Love When the Person You Love Leaves and Then Dies?”

 

Love and Hurt

So many people have asked this question—what is love?—and still no one has a definite answer. I can only say that everyone has their own definition. I don’t want to quote a dictionary because love isn’t the same for any two people. We each feel it differently.

Love is a mystery. It’s a burden. It’s the one thing that can start wars and tear lives apart.

They say love is endless, but I don’t believe that anymore. I can’t understand how two people who were once madly in love—who saw each other naked, body and soul, who shared that deep, blissful intimacy—can end up as the worst of enemies. If love were truly endless, it would fight to stay alive. It would hold things together instead of letting them fall apart.

Diana Ross sang it best: “Who would have ever thought the day would come when a love like this could fall into pieces?”

You give someone everything—your whole heart, your whole life—and still it shatters. If love is everlasting, why doesn’t it mend what’s broken? Why doesn’t it heal the wounds? Instead, it often makes the pain worse. That pain has destroyed so many people and left them empty.

Vanessa Williams asked, “How can you give your love to someone else and share your dreams with me?”

How can you love one person and still hold on to another? What kind of love is that?

Honestly, what is love?

What is it inside us that pulls us toward someone? What is that feeling that makes us care so deeply? People talk about the heart, but the heart just pumps blood. So where do these feelings come from? How do they work? It baffles me. I’ll never fully understand why we fall for someone. It makes no sense, and yet love is a language everyone on earth seems to speak.

People point to the love of Christ as the perfect example of unconditional love—He died for us. But I’m not talking about religious love right now. I’m talking about romantic love, the kind between a man and a woman. How can that kind of love disappear when you’ve given everything? How can two people who couldn’t live without each other suddenly want nothing to do with one another?

Is love just a feeling? Just pretty words invented by fools to trick the innocent?

Love has started wars and ended them. It has driven people to death and to things they never thought they’d do. And in the end, so often, it all amounts to nothing. The glow fades. Warmth turns to hate. That feeling of safety becomes disgust. Why?

A man and woman married for twenty years, with grown children, turn into bitter enemies and divorce because he had an affair with his secretary. If their love was so strong, why couldn’t she forgive? Why didn’t that love repair the damage? Why didn’t he fight harder for the woman he once swore he’d love forever?

You can wonder all you want, but here’s the truth I’ve learned: love fades. It vanishes. And in its place come hatred, disgust, and regret.

I don’t know why I’m writing this tonight. I feel heavy, almost melancholic. Maybe it’s because the only girl I ever truly loved died far too young. I always believed she would have been my wife. Life never gave us that chance, and it still hurts—every memory, every moment we shared, every promise we made. She left me for another man, married him, and shortly after, she was gone forever.

If she had truly loved me, would she have said yes to him?

I loved her with a passion that honestly scared me. I lived in fear of the day she’d leave—and then she did. That day burst the bubble I had called love.

So tell me again… what is love?