What is Love? (Baby, don't hurt me)

I’ve been surfing through blogland, and most of the bloggers I admire most have been talking a lot (I mean A LOT) about relationships, love, sex, marriage, swingers, and sometimes God in relationship to all that. Though many of them right now are spent like two lovers in post-coital bliss and are waiting in that in-between time until new energies drive them in different directions and new journeys (and new blogs), for now it’s made me pause and wonder why so much energy is being spent in blogland on discussions of love and relationships, especially in a place where we don’t see each other, don’t touch, our only interactions are our minds and words, a place to vent our psychic scream of anxieties and fears, hurts and longings that in our real lives and face-to-face conversations get hidden behind the mask of “everything’s fine. How are you?”

A friend of mine says that much of what is talked about regarding love is saddening, and maybe it’s true that there’s a lot of grief, pain, confusion, and skepticism in the ongoing discussion, and sometimes bliss, of love. It’s become a cosmic grope session, either in the sheets—reaching for the other person (or persons) to connect with, seduce, control or express something uncontainable—or out of them—wondering why some relationships don’t work while others do, (and for how long?), and whether we were meant to be with one person or not, and why something’s still missing that no relationship, no matter how good, can satisfy.

I don’t have much to say about it. Not today at any rate. Maybe I’m just as spent.
But it does make me think about our loneliness and why we keep reaching out, and why we choose to do this in a world of text and art where the connections are . . . different, nonorganic, and entirely non-sexual, at least in the traditional sense. By expanding the question beyond our most intimate relationships, friendships and families, are we trying to find answers from other voices? Or are we simply voicing our thoughts, desires and frustrations because it’s a driving impulse that we MUST continue talking about, no matter whether those thoughts are driven by hope or disillusionment? We can’t not talk about it. It provides release on some level, and maybe if nothing more, that helps.