Common Ground....Perhaps...

"But it's love. Stop rationalizing"
"Nothing can exist that is not rational."
"Love is....you can never explain it with logic."
"I just did, didn't I?"
"Yeah....but I don't want to believe that....you make it sound so cold and logical..."

And that's the truth. We don't WANT to believe it. The truth is that love does not exist, not in the sense that the movies and books and fairytales teach us as children. It's a fairytale concept, in that it is unreal. A myth. I read a post by Egghead that "intuition" is something "illogical" and is something not given enough credence. My view is simple. There is no such thing as "intuition" in the way we think of it.

Intuition is just a series of mental calculations that happens without our knowing it. We reach a logical conclusion based on probabilities that our brains compute, leading us to certain answers. It happens without our even realizing that it happened. And that's why we just tag it as "intuition", as something built-in, something that's "supernatural" almost..... It's the same with "love".

Most people just like to believe in the concept of love....that's all. It is just an emotion like any other. Let's take a small example.

"Do you love your parents?"
Nine out of ten at least, would answer yes, for at least one parent.
"Did you choose your parents?"
No....this, I am sure holds true for everyone ;-)
"So, what made you love them?

Answer: Rationality. Logic. And reason. Confronted with a situation that did not give you a choice, your brain made a decision. And that decided your emotions....together with the conditioning you were given that "you should love your parents." So where does that leave us? It essentially leaves us with the cold fact, that "love" is nothing more or less than a commonplace and weak (in the commonplace, everyday relationships) emotion that is easy to explain in terms of cold rationality.

Weak? Yep. Ever seen good friendships break over the trivialities that affect relationships? I think not.... For all the crap that people give about, "I'd do anything for him/her", the fact remains that any relationship based on things other than a deep friendship is more fragile than even a bone china cup...it is a farcical entity created out of the imaginations of two people who dream up visions of what the other is like....only to have them shattered, sooner or later.

Now, I hear people saying "you can't mention the thingy about parents and extrapolate." Fair enough. The fact is that even in the conventional (if I may say so) "relationship", if it is "real", the thing that makes it happen is that calculation that tells you that your chances of being happy with someone are higher with one person than with others. And that is why, several times, people are torn between two choices at certain moments. While the asinine fairytale concept will tell you that you can only love once, that's asinine (as I mentioned) and total bullcrap!!!! Sadly though, most people don't have a solid foundation or anything. They go with "their heart", which in common parlance can be substituted with "their arse".

Forget loving only once, you can love two people at the same time too!!! The degree may differ, but you can. I have seen it happen, as I am sure, have many of you...."Love" therefore is essentially a stupid concept peddled by movies, fairytales and card-shops, to dupe people into believing in it. The cycle becomes complete, when these people, after convincing themselves, convince others, who continue the cycle, aided all along by the vendors mentioned above....

"Why would you want to leave a path that has brought you happiness in the past?"
"Because of the realization that with it, it could bring so much grief and leave me open to so much pain."
"Would you think the same if it hadn't happened?"
"It did happen so the question is pointless."
"What if it could happen again?"
"That's what I am afraid of...."

Life, somehow, is never as unidimensional as we like to believe it is. There is always, in the immortal words of Star Wars, "the Dark Side". A dark side, which we conveniently ignore most of the time. Sometimes though, we are also guilty of focussing only on the dark side. I have seldom seen a person who is able to take a view of the two jointly and make a call based on....the common ground, for lack of a better term.