I like you, but I LOVE cheese

People are always trying to define love. That doesn't surprise me since love comes in a lot of varieties, some of which of kind of powerful. I get annoyed with people who moon over love, but I reserve my true contempt for anybody who has the testicular fortitude to tell someone else that what they've experienced in the past wasn't really love because it doesn't match up to their bullshit definition. Debate what love is or isn't. Fine. That's abstract. But if I'm talking about some time I was in love then take my word for it. For while defining love might be an occasionally interesting pastime for some wordsmith lovehounds, we pretty much have to take everybody's word for it when they say they have been in love. It's an abstraction. You know when you are in love or if it's just lust even if you try to change your mind later on. So fuck off with that.

This actually happened to me once in about 1998, by the by. I was sitting around my grad dorm drinking coffee that was too good for the dickhead I was drinking it with and talking about this woman I had been all fucked up over just a couple years prior. I'm 29 at this point and I know what the hell love is even if my own particular variety is an immature and unwanted thing. It was an unrequited situation with me and this woman. I had pretty strong feelings I couldn't ditch for one reason or another (mid-20s schizophrenia most likely) When I finally figured out that my feelings were misplaced, love turned to hate. That's not unusual in the annals of love. As anyone with a modicum of wisdom knows, love and hate are not opposites. The opposite of love is apathy. If you truly don't love someone, you don't care. If a love apple goes overripe, it's still a fuckin' apple.

Well this asshole tells me that if I don't still love her in some measure then I must not have really been in love.

How dare you, I thought. How DARE you, I said. How dare you sit in judgment of my emotions and judge them somehow less than your own. That's what you're doing. Who are you to measure these things. I know what I felt. I know what I feel. Then I blew the prick away with my little homily about love and hate being two sides of the same coin because they are both passionate emotions and he caved like the little bitch he was and probably still is.

What's really funny to me is that this guy left his old school in Arizona because his ex-girlfriend who was stalking him accused him of raping her. He denies it and he probably didn't rape her. I doubt he would tell me the story if had actually done it and he was such a ball-less pussy boy that I honestly don't think he'd be into that kind of thing. He once poo-pooed a porno of mine because the actress in it didn't look like she was having enough fun. Like Dirty Debutantes 27 was some kind of underground skank pic smuggled over the border by Mexican skin flick producers. This was over the counter crap, c'mon. You have to pay big money for movies that show people being abused for God's sake.

Anyway, my big question to him was: Are you still in love with the girlfriend you dumped who accused you of raping her ... falsely?

Well, of course that was different, wasn't it? She did him wrong. Cry me a river, Susie, love always ends badly. Even if it lasts forever, it cools. Love is not always a hot torrent of want and longing and need. Love can be like a comfortable pair of tennis shoes you only wear on the weekends around the house. Just because you never wear them in public doesn't mean you don't appreciate them and rely on them for years. You can love someone and take them for granted. Look at my parents. If my Dad loved my mother, he never acted like it while they were married. In fact, I was pretty surprised that he gave a shit when the divorce came down. He was emotionally absent at the best of times and emotionally abusive the other 95%. But when my mother actually kicked his ass to the curb, he fought like hell to stay in the saddle. He went wiggy. You'd've thought he was madly in love with all of us. Had he put a fraction of that effort into his marriage and maybe toned down his junk collecting, I do not doubt that my mother might have waited until my sister and I were in high school before she dumped him.


Anywho, love is one of the few things I find hard to define without using the word itself in the definition or getting too technical, but here goes. Love is a perceived emotional state brought on by various chemical reactions in the body associated with physical and mental attraction.

It's simple but deceptively so. I know what chocolate tastes like and so do you, but I don't know what chocolate tastes like to you even though when we talk about it, we reference similar sensations. It is also no coincidence that chocolate produces a similar chemical reaction as love. It raises endorfin levels. So does jogging.

So my advice is eat chocolate, go jogging and tell love to go fuck itself.