Love is what you make it.
The Beatles (Paul, especially) got it just right. So why is it, then, that we differentiate the types of love? Eros, Agape, Paternal/Maternal, being in love, loving someone, liking someone...it goes on. And what about the 7year itch? Does that mean you don't love your partner, even though just the thought of never seeing them again might cause your stomach to clench in anxiety whilst you gaze in transfixed desire towards a person you've never slept with before and can't bear to think of never touching. Is that love? It's not worth it to satisfy that craving and risk losing the companionship of a near decade, is it? Even if that new person might be your "soul mate"? Of course it's not...because cheating is wrong. I don't disagree with Dan Savage completely in this, though. I think trying to control your partner's sexuality to match your own is a kind of cheating, too. I just don't think that two wrongs make a right. Communication, people! But that infatuated lust that can sometimes become a longterm commitment because the guilt of ending longterm relationship for sexual satisfaction isn't love. If you actually do fall in love whilst currently emotionally entangled, I see nothing morally wrong with ending one relationship for another, so I guess Queen (mostly Brian May) had that right too. You don't stop loving one person when you start to love another.
But I digress, I was discussing the labelling and qualifying of love. Being in love and loving someone are two different things, hands down. But I don't see why I can't love someone in an "eros" kinda way at the same time I'm IN love with someone else in the same way. And by the end of my last long-term relationship I definitely was in love with my partner in an "agape" but not "eros" fashion. Can you love someone like a brother but still want to sleep with them? Can you be head over heels in love with someone and have no desire to ever see them naked? Why is a definite sexual element required for mainstream culture to consider a relationship healthy or permanent? "Hetero life mate" may be a jokey term but it's pretty damned solid as a possibility. Not everyone's going to find the sexual partner of their dream but I betcha they have a best friend...even if it's their pet. (And no, I'm not going to start an ethics conversation on bestiality.)
What is it about love that scares us all, not just philosophers, musicians and romantics, so much that we must label every little aspect of it? And when we no longer feel that need as a society and know only that we care, on some deep level, for many someones in combination...will that make us something more than the jealous, needy creatures we are now? Homo Amans--the loving man.
"And in the end, the love you take//is equal to the love you make" -- Paul McCartney.
"Too much love will kill you, it will make your life a lie.//Torn between a lover, and the love you left behind" -- Brian May.
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