A Difference of Love

Love does­n’t end, just because we don’t see each oth­er.”, she told him

Doesn’t it?”, he asked.

People go on lov­ing God, don’t they? All their lives. Without see­ing Him.”

That’s not my kind of love.”


I real­ize that on days like this — when the wind is cut­ting through the seams of my jack­et, when my stom­ach is so cramped that it twitch­es, when I’m uncon­trol­lably nod­ding off to sleep on the bus, when my trans­fer expires before I can use it, when incom­pe­tence isn’t keep­ing my appoint­ments — that I can’t call you. It just would­n’t help.

You aban­doned me when I need­ed you the most. I’ll nev­er trust you with any­thing impor­tant again. Including me.

You may say you love me, but I don’t love you. Not any­more.

This is how I real­ize that love is defined dif­fer­ent­ly by dif­fer­ent peo­ple.

My love is (was) bound­less.

Yours is of con­ve­nience.

5 comments

  1. Except, aren’t there eter­nal and uni­ver­sal def­i­n­i­tions for what pure and true love is?

    I wish mine could reflect those “uni­ver­sal” standards–untinged with con­tin­gency, unmarred by prej­u­dice, not based on need, with­out agen­da, and total­ly uncon­di­tion­al. I doubt I could ever love that pure­ly.

    It does­n’t sound like she was any­where close to it, though.

    I’m sor­ry you had to go through that.

  2. Love is like hap­pi­ness, it’s dif­fi­cult to define because it’s dif­fer­ent for every­one. I don’t believe that humans are capa­ble of uncon­di­tion­al love either. If they were, I think the world would be a much bet­ter place.

  3. @maeko — Loving pure­ly is very dif­fi­cult. It’s almost like you have to for­get every­thing you’ve been through.

    Why assume it’s a “she” though?

    @Sophia — You’re right. What you said has made me real­ize that I’m not capa­ble of con­di­tion­al love as well. It was wrong for me to say that my love was bound­less, because if it’s gone, then it’s obvi­ous­ly not bound­less. Capability of such a thing seems as far away as world peace to me.

  4. I have to email you my most recent post about love and uncon­di­tion­al love (on my secret blog). I will need your email address if I can’t find it on your site.

    I assumed it was a she because the first four lines of dia­logue were between a man and woman. I’m sor­ry if I was mis­tak­en.

  5. Ah, the dia­logue was tak­en from the movie The End Of The Affair.

    Just got your e‑mail, I’ll have to read it.

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