What is Love?

Is Love a destination or a station in transit? Are people who claim to be on the lookout for love really looking for love or is it something else that they are seeking? Love means many different things to different people but can anything really exist in so many different forms or is it just one thing that people have bent around for the sake of their own convenience? George Orwell paints the darker side of a society that cares only for convenience and not for values in his timeless offering, 'Animal Farm'. Rules are part of every society, religion, race and culture but how often is it that these rules are bent, often twisted completely out of context to obtain licences for doing things that would be too dastardly otherwise? These people who bend the rules feel guilty no doubt, about what they do, but that guilt is shortlived. More so when the society that these law breakers fear condone their actions instead of condemning them. That is how people get damned, twice over. Once for breaking the rules and the second time, for fooling themselves into believing that what they did was not bad, after all.

Love too is no different. Gibran says that Love puts one through the most taxing and stringent of tests before bestowing its gifts on the people who aspire for it. He says that Love threshes you to seperate your husk from you and then grinds you into wheat and then kneads you into dough to make you plaint and in the end, bakes you in the oven to make you fit to feed the Gods. Love puts one through so much of pain, anguish and suffering but in the end, gives the seeker so much more, but does anybody stay long enough to find out? Does anybody really experience the true nature of love? Often, I have come across people wistfully hoping for their Prince Charming/ Princess Snowhite to appear out of the blue and spirit them away from the humdrum everyday realitiies but do these people even realize that the same reality that they despise today might look like a bed of roses in comparison with what may befall them the next day?

People think they are looking at love but it's actually something else that they are looking at. Even the people who might know the truth deep down would not be willing to accept it. Why rock the boat when it is in steady waters? Why get up suddenly and lose the wonderful dream that is there? Why fix something when it is not broken completely and so on and so forth.

Love never makes an attempt to hide a part of itself, but if peoplle refuse to accept it for what it is and instead fool themselves into believing something that is not there, who is to blame? Love never fails, but people in love or those who think themselves to be lovers. often do. All too often.