9

People always seem to know what true love truly is. Whether it is because they have witnessed it or felt it, they all have an opinion. I, too, have my own opinion but it is because I recognize what I was lacking rather than what I actually possessed. I truly believed it was true love until it was gone and the speed at which it left me indicated that it was just a clever ruse my ego had designed. A philosopher, whose canon of unending wisdom I try to appropriate into my life, defined this as the common delusion the vast majority of us suffer: one falls in love with the image of a person our ego has projected onto them, blowing them up to an idea of who they are -- and idea they can never possibly attain simple because they exist in the realm of reality. Thus, when confronted with the fact that one has fallen in love with an idealized form, one is immediately disappointed and love dies swiftly. We are all Narcissus, falling for our own reflection in another only to be rudely awaked from this dream when we fall headlong into the frigid waters when we dive in for a kiss. Then we drown in reality and die alone.

People argue incessantly about love. Whether we are designed for it. Whether or not a one true love can exist. Whether abusing the word cheapens the meaning. What the depths of love are and whether there is a limit. And yet, language is so limiting that we can only devise synonyms for a single word that has prismatic meaning and feeling. All the patronizing couples will smile kindly and say that one will know love when they see it. I thought I had and I would have bet against my life upon it. I am only too thankful that I did not. We fell in love with what the other represented. I was the quintessential trophy- possessing me meant doing everything correctly in order to earn me. I meant success. He was a white picket fence and kitschy Christmas cards- being possessed by him equated to the happiness of smiling faces in aging photographs and advertisements. He meant comfort. We both fell in love with a symbol, a dream.

I define myself as a romantic and will forever be trapped in those teenage fantasies of obsession. I play make believe seeking something that burns hot for eternity, forgetting entirely of the laws of nature and the impossibility of such a phenomenon. But this obsession is purely ego that lies about reciprocity. I want to be the center of someone's universe and I want them to tell me so. I want to hear my name. I want to see my reflection in the glint of someone's eyes. I want to know what makes me so great. Only then can I reciprocate obsession for obsession. But this is not love. This is quintessential narcissism, elitism, sadism and inevitably masochism. This is destruction. Thus, I present my own ill-informed conjecture on the subject of true love: love is selflessness in the purest of forms. When one truly could willingly give up everything for the sake of another and not for the sake of saying so. It is not the selfish martyrdom so many seek in hopes of winning moral glory. It is no sacrifice for sacrifice denotes losing something while the gain remains limited to the ego whereas selflessness seeks no gain and loses nothing in the process. This, I imagine, is what true love must be like and thus it must exist in the farthest realm of possibility known to the human spectrum of emotion.