Something I am fond of saying is this, “Marriage is give and take. You give a lot of love, and you take a lot of shit. And that goes equally for both parties.”
Love is a truly magnificent thing which I believe makes life worth living. It is so much more than mere sex. It seems that love isn’t about doing things for yourself as much as it is about doing things for those you love, because by so doing you gain far more satisfaction than you ever gain by being a selfish ass.
However…
The essence of love is not selflessness, it is self. Only on the surface is selflessness the reason we do things for those we love. Dig a little deeper and you soon find the real reason we are so eager to please our loved ones is that doing things for them makes us feel amazing. If we did things for them that made them feel amazing but resulted in us feeling like crap we would soon stop, wouldn’t we? And it doesn’t matter a whit if those we love are people or animals, does it? And yes, I believe wholeheartedly that animals are worthy of our love. Not just of our care, but of our caring.
I have blogged about our dog[s] a couple of times, the root meaning of those posts is that the love of these precious creatures we call our pets is far more pure and unselfish than that of any human. Bacon, our dog, is the only person who never fails to greet me when I get home. She is always the first to sense when I’m unhappy, and she is always the first to soothe me. The therapeutic value of being able to pet her is incalculable.
If you’re a pet owner I wonder if you’ve ever asked yourself which part of that equation derives the most benefit? Your pets, for your care. Or you, for their caring? I think if you investigate it you’ll find those particular scales are balanced, and balance is itself another tangible benefit we derive from the wonderful and intangible thing called love.
I once said this
We are hedonists, one and all, some of the flesh, some of the soul, even the heart its love, doth wish to impart, and of another, imbibe.
— C.G.Ayling (@CGAyling) December 15, 2013
We are hedonists, one and all, some of the flesh, some of the soul, even the heart its love, doth wish to impart, and of another, imbibe.
Isn’t love another form of hedonism? I think it is, and I also think if we insist on considering love selfless we close a door that leads to better understanding of ourself. Me? I need to know why I do the inexplicable things I do. You see something else I think is that very little is really inexplicable. But love? Yes, it often seems to be. But that in no way detracts from love’s wonder, indeed perhaps it adds to it.
{P.S. This post was taken from a DM conversation on Twitter with a rather thought-provoking person, namely Cat From Nowhe®e on Twitter. I’m fairly confident they won’t mind I’ve used my side of our conversation as inspiration for this post, but I have been known to be wrong :). One of the nicest things about Twitter is that it allows us to develop relationships with people we’d never meet in our daily lives. I have no idea if @kv8 is a man or a woman, and while I have my suspicion on their gender it is actually quite liberating to be able to interact with them without any of the physical nonsense getting in the way of the conversation. If you haven’t tried it, you should.}
