Falling in love is a great feeling. The bliss of happy thoughts floating through my mind making everything seem a little brighter and better. It’s inspiring and it is an experience that is worth doing over and over again.
I am single, so I can repeat it a lot.
It isn’t the full fledged love that is so revered by romance novel readers, in fact, it isn’t really love at all. It’s more of an infatuation/distraction thing that I use to help me lose myself in thought. I don’t think it’s dangerous to my well-being because I’m not risking anything. In fact, it’s a device that I use to help me figure out what I’m thinking or, when thoughts are not coming, to inspire my thinking.
It does not deal with real people or at least any tangible aspect of real people. It isn’t love for the sake of companion or partnership – my goal with it isn’t to find lasting happiness, it’s to find a muse to riff on. Over the last years I’ve noticed that I write songs with more ease whenever I am feeling something. As with most expressive art, I have an easier time capturing feelings in if they are a little darker – I think that has something to do with negative emotional states being easier to maintain so you have a chance to actually capture their essence in words. But I don’t like writing lyrics or poetry all the time because going to that bad place, or staying in it, is uncomfortable. My last good stint of song writing was during my last few months in Chatham before I made the decision to return to Milton. It’s of no surprise that I was extremely unhappy during that period of my life.
What my quest for love deals with now is the idea of love and the possibilities that meeting someone new presents to me. I truly believe that relationships have the most potential right before the two people met. Before you know anything about another person, you can be anything to each other because limits have not been placed on the relationship. A world of opportunity exists provided we do not met or exchange any information that would place limits on these possibilities. This belief is both theoretically sound and useful in a practical sense as a thought exercise.
A commuter friend clued me into this practice. She takes the train to Toronto almost every weekday and develops “train crushes” on some of the people she sees during her travels. If you don’t commute on the train you may never have thought about it, but people tend to take the same train, riding on the same car, sit at the same spot and walk the same route everyday. Humans are creatures of habit and they naturally tend to automate the commuting experience because first thing in the morning you don’t really want to be thinking about anything. Well, she sees many of the same people day in day out and, over time, allows herself to float away in love fantasies. She has also noticed how finding anything out about these people will kill everything. Her crushes, like mine, only exist in a vacuum and will quickly fade away when new information is uncovered about the objects of our desire.
Why do we do it? Her reason and my reasons are very different. She didn’t have a blackberry or a laptop so she couldn’t work on the train. It was her, her iPod, the view of the Gardner and her crushes. But she has since got a promotion and all the mobile devices that come with the new position and now she works on the train. She doesn’t even consider train crushes anymore.
For me it is about creating a mood that leaves me hopeful for the future because I do my best thinking when I feel this way. Falling in love does this for me. I know it’s a state of mind so it’s always going to be there. I have little doubt that my cycling abilities will fade as I get older, I have the same certainty that my ability to feel love will remain high for as long as I live. Given this, I may as well learn how to tap into that source of positive emotion to fuel my writing, thinking and living. I’d be a fool to ignore this ability.
It’s worth mentioning that the death of these love feelings isn’t painless, but it isn’t too difficult either. Inside I KNOW that there is no mutual connection between me and them, there’s just a mental connection based on deliberate cognitive distortions. There *may* be a sense of perceived loss, but most of all, the muse dies and I go back to writing things that are more grounded in reality and somewhat less creatively inspired. There is a dissonant feeling when things start to go south. Initially I would start to feel a little out of sorts and be unsure of the reason why. But the process is clearer now. Once the out of sorts feeling kicks in, I know it’s time to put thoughts to paper, or screen, and let my fingers do my minds bidding.
Like this article right here, it reflects the end of love for someone.
I wonder if she is aware of the life we will not spend together or if she just realized that she really likes vanilla?