Being in Love

As I mentioned briefly in a previous post: being in love is desirable for forming a relationship, but it isn't everything by any means.

I, like many of you, was a child of divorce, and when I was your age I was deeply suspicious of being in love. This was because my mother said that she had been in love with my father; and she thought that being in love was a necessary and sufficient reason to get married; and she had nothing that reconciled those thoughts with the fact that she and my father had gotten divorced, causing great pain to them, and, especially, to me.

So I, in my younger years, did a lot of personal experimenting with love.  And I can tell you these things from personal experience: it is very possible, even likely, to fall in love with men who would make terrible husbands for any number of reasons. Also: it is very possible to be in love with two people at the same time.

I am not saying that there is no such thing as being in love: there absolutely is.  And it is one of life's best experiences, delivering euphoria in doses that it is hard to get in other ways. What's NOT true is that being in love means you will be happy with this person in the long term, and what's also not true is that true love lasts forever. This is a harsh reality, I know, and hard to come to terms with, so the way I prefer to express it is that being in love turns, if you are lucky and virtuous, into family love, the joy of both loving the same child, and being very fond of each other, and feeling like you have a life partner who is your best friend, and hopefully still having good sex. Hence the necessity for using your head as well as your heart when picking a husband.