"What's Love Got to Do with It" is a song recorded by the American singer Tina Turner, and the lyrics go on asking, You must understand though the touch of your hand makes my pulse react that it's only the thrill of boy meeting girl. (Or a girl and a girl or a boy and a boy) Opposites attract; It's physical. Only logical. You must try to ignore that it means more than that… What's love but a second-hand emotion? Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?
Love is a mystery to me. I have fallen in love before and I am in love now. But how to describe the feelings? And how can love be limited to only two people? It seems to me that love is the only thing that can expand and not be diminished. I love my wife. I love my son, and now I love my daughter in law and one day I will love their children (I hope).
Other than polyamory relations, which seem to me to be complicated, I believe that people can love others to varying degrees. Sometimes it is only Platonic love that we feel, sometimes it is erotic love. Society dictates what and who we can love, but our hearts do their own deciding and make their own choices. Not always wisely
Jealousy is the death of love, it eats away trust and it wants to own others. As if you can own someone. People are not things, they are free to love or not love whoever they choose. We make commitments to others, written and verbal, to be true to each other. We judge someone by how faithful they are to each other. Jimmy Carter was interviewed by Playboy magazine. They asked him if he had been faithful to his wife. He admitted, in an unsolicited comment, to two Playboy freelance writers that he had "looked on a lot of women with lust" and had "committed adultery in my heart many times.”
Can Men and Women be just friends?
That begs the question, can a woman and a man ever be only friends? Can you have a non sexual relationship or is it always fated to end up as sexual relationship? For years I have had women friends without any sexual relationship, and they are some of my most treasured friendships. There is a richness in those relationships. We can talk about things that I can’t talk about with men. They talk about emotional subjects, which men hate to do. They want to know about how you feel and how you handle a situation. They love to take a situation apart and analyze relationships. They see things men don’t understand.
Rainer Maria Rilke writes to a young poet about love:
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is — solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate — ?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), might young people use the love that is given them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and gather for a long, long time still), is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives as yet scarcely suffice.
