Destructive Love

When we love someone or something, we open ourselves up to it in a way that we do not open to anything else.  Whilst this allows the intensity of our emotions to amplify, it also opens us up to incredible pain and heartache.  This isn't just true of romantic love although that is the focus of most ruminations on the subject, love can be considered a delimitation on a scale of desire.  With liking, lusting, even hating and loathing, all forming part of the same scale.

The more we open ourselves up the more vulnerable we become, in doing so we place ever increasing levels of trust in those things that we love.  Whilst doing so with humans leaves us open to heartache that we can associate with those people, whenever we do so with animals and inanimate objects it becomes much more difficult to shift the blame to anyone or anything else, to the point where we have to accept that ultimately the heartache we experience when we are burned by love is our own fault not the fault of the other.

Rationale and reason however are often the first to disappear whenever we pursue the things we like, love, hate, and loathe and all that lies in between.  I am not speaking of romantic love alone although it applies there too, no instead I am speaking more of the love of things that really can't love us back, at least not in the way that we do for them.  Something as simple as the love of food, or drink, or anything else, if it is something we hold a desire for, even when we know it will cause us harm, our emotions override logic and reason and we pursue it still.

For me, spicy food is an example.  When I was younger I ate it all the time, and had no problem doing so.  I ate jars of chilli peppers as snacks, and devoured Madras that was so hot it was like microwaving lava on the sun - 10 points if you get that reference.  Yet my tolerance for it has waned with age, much to my dismay.  Despite the love of spicy food, and the happiness it gives me when eating it, what inevitably ensues causes quite a lot of pain now - quite literally physical pain.  My constitution cannot handle it anymore.  This isn't the only thing that I once enjoyed but now cannot tolerate.  There was one infamous night where I took my love of Tequila too far and spent the rest of the early morning with my head in the bowl, that was many years ago and to this day if I drink any Tequila at all it goes down and then comes right back up.

Sooner or later you have to learn that even if your emotions are telling you yes, you have to accept the answer needs to be no, not because you want it to be, but because it has to be, or suffer the pain.

When it comes to love of people, both platonic and romantic, the same too applies.  If we allow ourselves we will forever pursue that which is destructive, and our emotions will convince us time and again that it is the right thing to do, even when we know the pain will come.  When love is destructive you have to ask yourself if you're willing to be destroyed in order to experience it.  As I said, like, love, hate, and loathing all form part of the same scale, and they too form part of the same behavioural precedent.  They can all be incredibly destructive to us, yet the desire to pursue them can be overwhelming, you have to ask yourself if it is worth it in the end.