True Love
Jake LaManna
Issue date: 3/14/05 Section: features
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For Versus' Valentine's Day issue, I suggested that a piece be written not just on love, but true love. Unfortunately the responsibility fell to me. Being a hopeful - not hopeless - romantic, I prayed that this article would be more than a sarcastic critique, a joke-fi lled rant written by a jaded, brokenhearted fool.
Love is an impossibly personal emotion. It causes a cascade of good and horribly awful memories to burst forth. People are off ended if it is claimed too quickly, or if it isn't given freely enough. I wanted to dig deep. I wanted to know about the pink elephant in the crowded room: what do college students think about the apparent myth of true love? Naturally, people are uncomfortable talking about love; from those brave souls willing to share, I found plenty who continue to believe in its existence of love.
The essence of true love is oxymoronic. It is the objective occurrence of an exclusively subjective emotion. Those who believe in true love tend to believe that it is for everyone. The difficulty is that many people defi ne true love very diff erently. Some believe that true love is something that two people must share, while others believe it to be a quality you possess within yourself. Is true love a one way street or a carefully balanced scale?
Since love is such a personal emotion, I feel I should give a quick summation of my experiences with it so that you, the reader, will have a notion of my personal biases. Love is grounded in biases; they are the water which used too sparingly will desiccate love, and used to liberally will drown it. I hope, for all our sakes, that my biases are neither a fi nger pruning fl ood of self-pity nor a scalding drought of insensitivity.