I Was In Love Once…

For the first 28 years of my live (well the latter half of those years at any rate) I had life figured out. By challenging everything I knew about the world, philosophically speaking, I came to establish my own Ultimate Philosophy, which views the universe from a central, internal-to-me, point of access and reasons that only I can share my unique view of my world.

Now this brings two things:

1. An irrefutable underlying logic to the world that removes me from the widespread perceived notion of an absolute shared existence with other humans.
2. Loneliness.
   Once you accept that your existence can never be fully shared - ultimately your own universe will collapse in on itself - you logically assume that attempting to share your existience with anyone save your is illogical.

For 28 years I have held this view - the only logically possible one when you truly think about it - and became resigned to the fact that I will spend my existence in a smug-to-others, self-controlled bubble of logical self-certainty.

And then I fell in love.

For the record, it happened just over a year ago now. And I’m not going to begin to attempt to describe the emotions, feelings, trials that you go through whilst falling in love - a great deal about it has already been said by writers greater than myself - but if any one of these symptoms sound familiar, then you’re probably falling in love with someone [or have an inner ear imbalance]:

• Inability to think about anyone/anything else - daydreaming about the seemingly endless possibilities of spending your life with someone; sharing their time; their memories; their highs and lows; their jokes; their very existence - and literally not being able to sleep for a week because your self has finally broken into the arena of something that you’ve been observing and speculating about from a far for the past few years
• You know all those really annoying and cheesy pop songs that sing about love and all the joys it can bring? Well, those normally irritating pockets of scripted emotion allowing you to break from whatever crazy thing Chris Evans just said on Radio 2; they utterly own you now. Rather than cynically brushing them off as shallow corporate cash-ins on a fairly-well documented shared human experience - instead your whole being is swept along by the song’s lyrics and chime with everything you spent the whole night before thinking about
• If you have an expansive imagination like I seem to have, your love delusion will accelerate away from you and throw back scrapbook shots of your future live(s) with the person of your affections - Remember that time she came to meet your gran for the first time, and you cracked that Big Bang Theory joke along the way to ease her nerves?

Put simply, falling in love fucks you up; but in the most gloriously wonderful way imaginable.

And then you have to tell that person that you’re in love with her.

Now I have been nervous before a show before - on at least one occasion I came close to throwing up right before the curtain went up - but that is nothing when a whole week has been hijacked to thinking about this person, and how you (at least) want to spend so much more time together.

And so it went; and I told her, and she explained that she didn’t feel the same way; and from that moment on I knew we would remain ‘just friends’, and an entire universe’s worth of possibility was shut off from me - plummeting me into darkness, and pulling the metaphorical rug from under my feet.

This wasn’t how my feelings had told me it would pan out.
And yet, it was how my brain had told me it would pan out.

You see, I came prepared to my day of reckoning; carrying with me the knowledge of my previous 28 years; that love isn’t something you can will onto someone - not yourself; not anybody else - it is all those million-and-one things people have already sung/written/filmed about in all the centuries past; it is not something you can directly control.

Love is everything my logical universe isn’t - and that is as far as I go trying to define it.

What was then important for me to learn was how to deal with having fallen in love with someone who wasn’t in love with me in return.
Fortunately in the short term I had a holiday to Vietnam planned, so that would be a useful distraction - and it was; in more ways than I could imagine {but more on that another day}.
Suffice to say, that when I returned from 'Nam, I still had feelings of love - which I had reasoned with myself about on many occasions, explaining to myself that it was never meant to be - and the cold-hard truth of the matter is that existence I had clung to with my body and soul, was not a future life for me.

Which is fine - I can reason with that.
But sometimes reason is not enough.

Just as feelings of love wasn’t enough to make what I wanted to happen, or to cope with the expected rejection; reason wasn’t enough to take away the pain of the rejection and the denial of what part of me wanted.

In fact, it has taken a year or so for me to get through some of this; not least because of additional complications I won’t go into. And also due to some more immediate medical distractions {again, for another day} - it took me a long time to come to terms with what happened:

1. I always thought my self-centered existence, with solid philosophical foundations and the company of just myself, was enough.
   Love happened to other people, and whilst an anomaly in my world-view; it wasn’t for me.
2. Falling in love has happened: Yes it didn’t end the way I had hoped - but I didn’t die because of it either.
   Sure, I nearly died because of something else - but the two weren’t related.
3. It is better to have loved and lost that it is to have loved at all.
   I’m paraphrasing Tennyson, but this is a statement I agree with wholeheartedly. In comparison to the first 28 years of my life, the past year has had at least the same level of impact as did reading Hitchhikers, or the fervent nights awake in my teenage years, resolving one pop-philosophical conundrum after another
4. Love is all you need.
   I still disagree with this one: Apart from the obvious life-sustaining intakes you absolutely need; logic and reason have been an important bed for this experience.
   As well as reasoning that I should confront my emotions with the target of my affections; logic prepared me for the rejection in a matter-of-fact 'if then what’ way.

Ultimately the past year has changed me.

Change is inevitable, but it can also be unexpected.

The best we can do is to pick ourselves up from the road, dust ourselves down, and keep on going.

Of course, it helps when others are with you to help you up - I for one can vouch for that - but when you are alone with your emotions, and you have only your experience to go on, it becomes more of a challenge.

I’ll finish with the best piece of advise I received from a friend:

There is no such thing as 'the one’.

I’m pretty sure - on this occasion - he wasn’t quoting Agent Smith.

His meaning was that there isn’t one person you are destined to be with - the world doesn’t work like that - instead there are multiple realities out there, involving a multitude of options - and I doubt staying at home, with the readily-available distractions of the modern world to hand, isn’t the best way to explore these options.

And this chimes rather nicely with my world-view - ultimately there cannot be a perfect match out there for me; but what there can be is a number of possibilities that - given an infinite amount of time and dimension - would not completely share my universal existence - but, as I am human and only have a finite existence; given the amazing permeations of life we already have on this planet, there is a chance that maybe - just maybe - I can find somebody to love. And to be loved back.