COULD THIS BE LOVE?

She is beautiful. She is fair. She is polite, kind, humble and meek. She is soft-spoken. She doesn’t speak too much nor too little. I look at her see everything I’ve ever wanted in a woman. She’s just perfect. I silently observe her and I just don’t imagine how things could fall apart sometime. And yet, I can’t ignore the fact that they might.

I keep wondering over and over again what always happens in love. How does something that appears to be endless bliss at first end up in indescribable pain and tears? What normally happens? Where does the passion fade to?

Love is the element without which, we all agree, life would be meaningless. But it’s also the element without which, pain would be monopolized by death. It is the mystery that science can’t explain, and the defect psychology can’t solve. It is the pain we all crave for.

But what normally happens in love? It is funny how people who are so in love can easily fall out of love. It makes you wonder how fast things can fall apart.

Let me tell you some love stories the world shies to talk about.

King Edward VIII, of England, was forced to abdicate the throne in order to marry the woman she loved, Wallis Simpson, an American socialite who had twice divorced. The British couldn’t stand a woman, with three husbands who eat and breathe, living in Buckingham Palace. What a sacrifice he made in the name of love. Did he think for a moment about how sour the love could have turned? I doubt he did. But thank God it didn’t.

Then there is Princess Margaret, his niece. She had hoped against all odds to marry Captain Peter Townsend, a divorced man, a marriage that never came to be because such was forbidden for a member of the British Royal Family. She gave up that love and later married the man you know as Lord Snowdon. While theirs was love at first sight and kicked off with successive episodes of indescribable bliss, it ended up in wreckage that Princess Margaret herself barely survived.

And the story told of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. That their love tale barely stood fifteen years despite her auspicious personality and charm that saw her garner the love of the public eye for the few years she lived, not to mention her conspicuous beauty.

I will not be able to tell of every love story I know off. Perhaps, it would be easier to understand if you grew up in a broken family. The pain it brings. The indifference it creates. The hate it propagates.

It is not always that love turns into a foggy night with countable droplets of happiness. Sometimes, like in the case of King Edward VIII, it always abides. So, what’s the secret? What do those that survive do differently?

Or is love just an illusion to which no human is immune?

I mean she is my dream woman. Would it turn out someday to be just lust? Well, how do I know if what we have is real? How do I know if she is even real?

I think as young people, we need to think more clearly about love than we ever did before. Marriage is not an institution we just walk into with crowded minds, pampered egos, and uncensored rigid expectations. If we do, we certainly are doomed to face that wreckage that Princess Margaret, of all people, faced, and God help us, may we survive.

Love and lust are different. And though I think it is love, shouldn’t I walk away when I realize it’s anything but love?