Love: Live it, or Lose it?

Comeback.

2009-08-29T01:21:00.002+08:00

I'm back, after over a year's unannounced hiatus.

Following my last entry, my perception of love messed up and I slipped into an inescapable whirlpool of cynicism that just sucked me in no matter how hard I tried. I had poured all my heart and soul into something, someone, who I had unfailingly believed in; but it suddenly stopped.

My last entry, "When is enough, enough?" was in August 2008. Just a month and a half after that, I found that I found the answer to my own question; I reached the point in my life and relationship I thought I'd never reach. It was quite frightening for someone who'd thought she'd found all sense and direction when it came to her emotions. It was a pivotal moment in my life. It didn't even hurt as much as I'd always thought it would.

I think it was then that I realized that love never stops suddenly, or abruptly. There's always a slight, gradual decline that ultimately destroys everything. You see it, you feel it, you know it's there; but you don't want to believe it. You live in denial till one day it's just, over.

So now I'm back, clarity re-instilled.
Love is different for each and everyone of us; but I wanna figure it out.

It's something that we all wanna understand at some point in our lives, isn't it?

When is enough, enough?

2008-08-17T01:38:00.011+08:00

Once again, another delayed entry thanks to school. The closing of a semester in Poly is clearly one of the worst periods ever. Just when we all thought we were stressed; it gets worse. And the scary bit is that lecturers tell us that what we’re experiencing now is the honeymoon period. Everyone, say it with me: Oh my God.

Let’s focus.

“I have to ask you a question. It's a good one so think about it. If two people love each other, but they just can't seem to get it together; when do you get to that point of enough is enough?”
- Samantha Barzel, The Mexican

Well, that’s the first part of the quote, the base and inspiration of today’s entry: when is enough really enough?

I’ve always had this belief that love is the foundation of our existence. You could say that I’m very much of a hopeless romantic. The whole love-triumphs or love-will-overcome-all mentality. Seen Moulin Rouge? Think Ewan McGregor’s character, Christian, from that film. Perhaps you could call it naivety and a childish state of mind, of sorts. I once believed that while everyone’s life comes with strings (what we’d normally call “pain”) attached; no one will be deprived of that fairytale ending; in my eyes, the ending has already been written, it’s just a matter of riding it all out till you get there.

I grew up believing that as long as you love someone, and they love you back; the future’s decided. You grow up together, you live your lives together, and you wind up together – easy as pie. But really, it isn’t that way is it?

It’s hard, isn’t it? Being in love? First you have to deal with the overwhelming emotions, then the fact that you want to be perfect for this person (while we all know that perfection’s close to impossible to reaching), and then love itself isn’t so smooth sailing. Love can turn you upside down, inside and out – somehow still remaining true and right.

Like I said to begin with, love’s gonna hurt. How much hurt do you hold onto before you give up? Let’s say you go through the most emotional pain you could ever imagine, you could:

(1) Give up, never knowing what could’ve been
(2) Hold on and face the possibility of either (a) wasting your time or (b) having what you’ve wanted all along

Sad to say, too many times in life I’ve seen or heard of the first option occurring. People say, “Enough of the hurt already. It’s time to let go.” I’ve seen friends choose that, I’ve heard friends telling me that. It’s natural isn’t it, to try to protect ourselves. Letting go seems to be the wiser choice. It’s when the mind overrules the heart.

Who really wants to hurt? In fact, if you ask me, emotional pain is the worst pain you could ever even try to endure. So, sometimes, people give up and turn away from taking the risk; they live with the regret, or the short (or sometimes long) term thoughts of what could have been. Those who choose to hold on are pretty much emotional masochists.

You’re in love? So what? We can’t get it right, and so enough is enough, it’s time to stop. Game over.

Personally, I think that regret is the worst thing to experience. Recently, I let someone walk away, and despite the long period of what seems to have been nothing but telltale signs of a bad future for us both, in my heart, I still hold hopes. The thoughts of how it should be, how it could be, still haunt me. Truthfully, I am still holding on. I suppose I am now considered an emotional masochist – great.

Basically, the message that I wanna share today (in my roundabout manner), is clear enough in the second part of the quote. Let’s look at the whole thing, shall we?

Samantha: I have to ask you a question. It's a good one so think about it. If two people love each other, but they just can't seem to get it together; when do you get to that point of enough is enough?

Jerry: Never.

If two people love each other, no matter how hard it gets, they will “get it together”. As long as true love is present between two beings: it’ll always be there, and it’s always worth fighting for.

True love, for the win;
I'm banking on it.

The truth

2008-08-11T00:35:00.003+08:00

Love hurts.
Excruciatingly.

There comes a point of time, when we must all let go of the fairytale endings we once dreamt of; the things that blinded us from the truth.

Something more substantial coming soon.

Belief

2008-07-13T12:56:00.000+08:00

Apologies for the holdup, school keeps me sufficiently occupied and there isn’t as much time as I hope for matters of leisure.

So anyway, today I’m gonna talk about love and belief. What is belief exactly, and how or why am I linking it to love? The dictionary on my Mac defines belief as something one accepts as true or real; a firmly held opinion or conviction. I think belief’s something we HAVE to have in our lives or life itself is meaningless. Similarly, if we don’t believe in love, we can just about cross out any hopes of finding it.

You know how people tell you that you should wait for love to come to you? I wouldn’t say that I think it’s a big loada crap, but rather I don’t believe in it all that much. Here’s the thing, if you sit patiently and wait for it, how would you recognize it when it really comes? Like they tell you, you don’t earn things without working for them; isn’t it the same with love? Bet you’re wondering what I’m rambling about since I said I’m gonna talk about belief right? Actually, I think it’s all interconnected. You see, if you just wait for love, you wouldn’t be totally, completely believing in it right? So let’s assume that love DOES come along, are you gonna know it when it comes along?

You need to do the courageous thing and put yourself out there when it comes to love; something that really scares some people (and sometimes, they have every right to be). Like I said previously, love’s gonna hurt, but if you hold back, you could miss out on something great. You need to believe that it’s gonna be worth it, believe that there’s something, someone out there who’s gonna be everything you believed in.

So that’s believing in love. Now, on to believing in THE person. Sometimes, it isn’t so easy. No love or relationship is flawless; as much as we like to think that it is. There’s some problem somewhere and when there’s a problem, we lose faith, we lower our expectations. Why must we lower our expectations? We don’t have to.

People are gonna let us down, life itself is going to let us down; heck, even we’re gonna let ourselves down. We believe things will turn out a certain way, believe that people will be all we want and need; but more often than not, it doesn’t turn out that way. And when this happens, we get let down, we get hurt. So it feels a lot safer not to believe in something special.

I’m not gonna lie, sometimes it hurts to believe; scratch that – Alotta the time, it hurts to believe. But what’s the point of living life with sucha big safety net? We need to venture out and throw ourselves on the line, don’t we? We need to take a chance and give the world a whirl. Let’s put it this way:

Maybe believing is gonna hurt… but if you don’t try, you’ll never witness for yourself that maybe it won’t.

Just to share, when it comes to believing, I think this is by far the most powerful quote that has ever come my way. From One Tree Hill:

“Make a wish and place it in your heart. Anything you want, everything you want. Do you have it? Good. Now believe it can come true. You never know where the next miracle is gonna come from, the next smile, the next wish come true. But if you believe that it's right around the corner, and you open your heart and mind to the possibility of it, to the certainty of it. You just might get the thing you're wishing for. The world is full of magic. You just have to believe in it. So make your wish. Do you have it? Good. Now believe in it. With all your heart.”
- Lucas Scott, Peyton Sawyer, Brooke Davis, Nathan & Haley Scott;
One Tree Hill

So if you believe in love, believe in a person; believe in it, believe in them… with all your heart. ‘Cause love IS about the heart isn’t it?

The Introduction

2008-07-01T03:49:00.000+08:00

So, here it is – the first entry.

I suppose it would be most apt to give a brief introduction, so here it goes. I’m Sam Koh, twenty years of age in November, currently studying in a Polytechnic. I am far from eloquent, so if you wandered here looking for something profound, you’re gonna be quite disappointed, I’d say. Don’t expect many quotes that come from the depths of some poets’ soul, because here, you’re more likely to find quotes from television programs, movies, or songs you hear on the radio; or even references to things like comics. Sorry, but that’s just how I am.

So, with all the boundaries laid and the parameters set, I think that’s all anyone really wants or needs to know about me, if anything at all; and now we can start. Oh wait, here’s a big thank you going out to Lance at Renaissance Publishing for starting Project Blook for all of us, think it’s a pretty cool idea (:

On to the whole point of this, my topic, “Love: Live it or Lose it?” is about… (no points for guessing) Love! I think it’s a really common thing in most people’s lives be it love within a family unit, platonic love or romantic love. Like Hugh Grant said in Love Actually, “Love actually is all around” (see, what’d I tell you about the quotes). But like most teenagers my age, I’m focusing mainly on romantic love. It’s the thing that makes us happy, makes us feel wanted, but sometimes (on not so rare occasions), it makes us horribly depressed.

What in the world is it about romantic love that makes some of us want it so badly? Let’s weigh the facts:

(1) We come into the world alone (even twins aren’t born at the exact same moment)

(2) And unless we pull a Romeo & Juliet, we’re most likely to leave this world alone

So within the time between point one and two, we chase after this thing called love, hoping that it’s everything we’ve heard of, everything we’ve wanted it to be. From On The Line, “love may not make the world go round, but it makes the ride worthwhile” – or, like I said, so we hope. In our dreams, it makes everything right, it makes us feel over the moon; but in reality, does it always turn out that way? No. At some point in every relationship, we get hurt, we cry; heck, sometimes we even come close to losing our minds.

It’s like this: we know love’s gonna hurt at some point, but we keep our fingers crossed and just hope it won’t. But the truth is that it’s gonna. We know by poking a beehive, we’re gonna tick off the bees and get stung; so (usually) we don’t. Why do we tempt fate and pursue love when we know it’s gonna hurt?

Because this is just the first entry, I'm not gonna go much further into stuff or get too personal yet. Takes time, ay? But it's plain to see that more often than not, we choose to live it than lose it; even when the odds are so strongly against us, even if it turns out one-sided or you seem to be fighting a losing battle; still, the choice is to live it. Why?

Right now, the reason I'll give is: because it's love. But I'm sure that in time, each and every one of us will find specific reasons (or a specific person) to explain this and to believe; no matter how irrational they seem to others.

As for me, I know I've found mine.