What's the deal with this love thing?

rEver since I was a wee lass, people have been feeding me the same nonsense about love. "It's inexplicable," they say about the emotion. "Love is forever." When asked how one knows when one is in love, the answer is always the same: "You just know."

This has not been the case for me.

I am forever attempting to reconcile logic and emotion. I am told that emotions do not make sense; I don't believe that. Emotions come from somewhere and are rooted by something. You don't like someone? There's a reason for it. People may blame it on "gut instinct," but even at the most basic level, there's a damn reason why someone dislikes someone else. There is a smorgasbord of emotions: fear, frustration, anxiety, dislike... And there are reasons for all of them. So why is the love thing so different?

And if that weren't bad enough, people talk about falling in love as if it's all rainbows and unicorns. Folks throw logic out the window when speaking of love. They lament about falling in love with the wrong people, as if it's not a conscious choice. "Oh why, oh why do I always fall in love with the wrong people?" they scream to the heavens. And then, as an afterthought, they add, "It's not as if you can control who you fall in love with, you know."

This statement is a fallacy.

Of course you can control who you fall in love with. Certain people are off-limits. Married people. Co-workers. The guy with the nine-page felony record. It's a matter of filtering. You ascertain the unsavory (or forbidden) characteristics, and then decide not to love that person.

So what's the deal with this love thing? I don't get it. I've never "just known" I was in love with someone. I question it, and think through it. I compare the way I feel about someone with the facts and experiences that make up the relationship. I stew and I ponder. And I reach a conclusion. It may not be romantic, but it's pragmatic.

I've found, through long-time empirical studies, that there are several types of fallers-in-love:

Faller in Love Type #1
There are those who profess to fall in love in no time at all. They toss around "I love you" as if it's going out of style, as if there's a finite number of times they're allowed to say the phrase and they have to cram it all into a small window of time. They are obsessive in their need to say the words again and again, until the words have no meaning anymore.

Faller in Love Type #2
There are those who say "I love you" when they do not mean it. They say it because it's the proper response to someone else professing love. They say it because it's time. Sometimes they say it because there's a lull in conversation and they get so anxious about filling the silence, that they blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. Or perhaps they say it because they've gone looney in a bout of post-coital bliss. They give their partners a false sense of security; they allow people to think they are loved in return, when the are not.

Faller in Love Type #3
There are those who fall in love too often. The twenty-five-year-olds who claim to have been in love no fewer than five or ten or fifteen times in their lives. I don't know about anyone else, but I want to be special; I don't want to be another in a long list of individuals who my mate has been madly and head-over-heels in love with. Such a thing is akin to the Faller In Love Type #1; falling in love means little to me when you've fallen in love with everyone you've met.

As for me? I do not fall into any of these of these types. I wait. I wait until I'm sure. I wait until it means something. I am precise with my language, and refuse to say something I do not mean. And even when I do say it, I say it quickly and quietly. So quickly and quietly, in fact, that it is often missed altogether. I never "just know." The only thing I do know is that love is not easy. It is not all sugar and sunshine-dust. Like most things worth having or doing, love takes work.

Lest you think I'm a complete naysayer, I will concede one thing to the sappy romantic, the slobbering, love-crazy fool: Love does last forever. I don't believe in falling out of love. It's always there, in some deep, dark cavern. It may fade over time, sure, like the memory of a seemingly long-forgotten childhood trip to the circus. But it doesn't go away. And since it doesn't go away, since it's always with you, since no one ever really truly falls out of love, it makes sense to be sure of it before you go around saying stuff you can't take back.