Being in love is a mysterious experience. Many have tried to define it, and few have been able to make much sense of it. What does it mean to love and be in love? How can that become the matrix of our entire daily life? How can we live it so that, whatever else we are doing to meet life's many responsibilities, we are mainly cultivating a persistent sense of mutuality between us as lovers? It is that kind of connectedness afterall, that generates all the meaningfulness in our relationships.
Some think that we are stimulated to the deep, earthly chemistry reactions of being in love by seeing characteristics of our love objects that we remember unconsciously as the way our mothers or fathers looked. We have early memories of seeing them from the crib in our helpless infancy. Now we see similar images in our lovers. Others associate the reaction of being in love with smells, sounds, body shapes, auras of virility or fertility or cherishing responses that give us the deep sense of peace we seldom experience and perpetually long for.
If we take the biblical Book of Songs as an expression of the chemistry and electricity of falling in love, we must conclude that the buttons that turn us on are physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual. Those buttons are olfactory, gastronomic, religious and aesthetic. That is, they have to do with how our love objects smell, taste and respond to us and how they sense and share with us the meaning of things. The things that stimulate us have to do with the powers of thought. We respond to the way in which they appreciate the beauty of things all around us. That includes especially the beautiful way they sensitively cherish our presence, words, desires values and longings.
Often, it seems that when we fall in love, our lovers sense our meanings before we finish expressing them. They complete our sentences before we get to the end. They know what we are feeling before we can say it. Falling in love is delicious and often so intense, a longing that is actually painful....
Nice article!!