The greatest thing you'll ever learn...

So, I just watched Moulin Rouge with some of my roommates over the weekend (by the way, watching a romantic/ lovey-dovey film does NOT make you feel any better about your love life. Just FYI). When the film ended, one of my dear roommies kept saying "Love doesn't exist." This made me kind of angry. And it took a little bit for me to figure out why her blanket negation bothered me so much...

It was because her absolute denial of even the existence of love cheapened and denied my own experiences. If love didn't exist, then the feelings I've had for other people where something else, something less. Like, affection, lust, whatever. Not love. Now, I've had some rough times with love in the past, especially recently, and my love has caused me a great deal of pain, but I can never deny what I felt for those men. I have loved, and even though this roommate has not have this experience, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, that it won't happen.

I think too many people are hopeless. They may be like my roommate, who, because they have never experienced love can not believe it exists. They refuse to see beyond their own lives, to hope in something beyond their own memories and surroundings. I think this view is too narrow, and not only denies the holder of such views hope for something more, for something better. All they have is what they have and what is given to them, and they do not look for anything more. Its a kind of life-apathy, a lack of ambition.

The other group has experienced love, but because they got burned or spurned, they doubt the veracity of their experience. I have one friend in particular who falls into this category. They lash out at love's reality or meaning become bitter and cynical. It's not necessarily that love doesn't exist, but that it doesn't exist like everyone says it does. Love is a farce, a fake, an unrealizable ideal. These people reject love, although at one point they would have done anything for it, and I think, deep down, still would. They are callous and pretentious, ignoring what they have felt, shutting themselves off to further possibilities and experiences.

I heard somewhere that to love someone unconditionally is to see the face of God. And I believe that. One of the most poignant and moving movie lines I've ever heard comes from M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water, when Paul Giammatti's character says, talking to his dead wife a children, "I miss your faces. They remind me of God." Love is something profoundly spiritual, an ability that enables us to move beyond the constraints of our humanity. If love doesn't exist, then so much of what empowers us to be more than what we are is lost, nothing more than empty hopes.

I'm not trying to idealize love, or romanticize it. I know that love is work. Hard work, and lots of it. I know that love isn't always great, that sometimes you have to love the unlovable, that sometimes love isn't reciprocated. And love and the pursuit of love can cause a great deal of pain that some people would rather do without. Yes, love is hard, but perhaps that's part of why its so important.