I had a pretty interesting discussion with DP yesterday, and I should say a few words about it. I hereby proclaim myself an inexperienced expert on love, and warn that all my words should be taken with a grain of salt.

When you do fall in love with a person, as happens to around a guesstimate ten thousand people every day, it is interesting to analyze what happens to you. I’m not talking about testosterone weds oestrogen – they are important just superficially – what happens inside your crazy little head? What are you thinking, putting another person’s happiness before yourself? Why are you so infatuated, so bloody well in love with hir?

Since love is by definition crazy and inexplicable, I seek not to answer that question. Perhaps though, all of us are intrinsically very lonely people and we just need to love to get some sanity into our world. The issue on the table though is that if love happens once, and then is lost (death, indifference, or plain cruelty) can it happen again? Should it happen again?

DP remarks on the callous youth, and how every now and then, one or the other of her students seem to just so easily move on after being scorned or just breaking up and moving on to other people. Is that then what they had love? Can true love ever happen twice? Interestingly enough, she says yes to both those questions, so I find her position contradictory and yet infinitely understandable.

My uninteresting prose will now give way to Byron’s poetry:

In her first passion, a woman loves her lover,
in all the others all she loves is love.

I intepret those words (still remaining gender neutral) thusly: When you love the very first time, when you hear and see a person who you know deep down in your bones is just so right for you, when you think with your heart and soul and find happiness in being with that person, you find love. If you lose that love – that lover – you’re crushed and broken and despondent. But every time you see a candidate you seek in hir those qualities that you adored and worshipped and wished you had again.

That is, so to say, you love being loved… Again, and again.