What Is Love?

It’s been a long, long time since I wrote anything. Since the first half of last year I’ve hardly written at all. First, there was nothing to write about. Second, I’m lazy. Third, whatever I wrote, only I would read.

What is love? A physiological reaction, without limit or end. (Epigraph) Looking into each other’s eyes, telling the things you find funny, strolling through the city, watching the passersby, walking for miles, talking without ever running out of things to say, then grinning at each other like idiots. I think this is what they call love. I say love is a physiological reaction. Some say it isn’t. Two people meet and fall in love, bodies rubbing together, each completing the other. Tell me, isn’t that a physiological reaction? I say love is a strange phenomenon. Some say it isn’t. Two people meet and fall in love, no words needed, hand in hand. Tell me, isn’t that a strange phenomenon? I say love is an adventurous journey. Some say it isn’t. Two people meet and fall in love, no writing needed, adventuring together. Tell me, isn’t that an adventurous journey? I ask: love, what is it, really? Sex gives us reproduction; God gives us thought. So love is sex sublimated. Love and sex can have nothing to do with each other, or they can. Love can ignore sex, and sex can ignore love. When the two are joined, that’s making love. Platonic love: I think even if I were in the underworld, we could still love each other, because we can set aside the desires of the flesh and pursue something higher of the spirit. Some say this kind of love is just fantasizing, and maybe that’s right, maybe that’s wrong. In a world of flesh and lust, how many people can understand it? A woman’s first time goes to a man, or a woman, or to herself. A man’s first time goes to a woman, or a man, or to himself. Is that loving the other person, or loving yourself? Opposite-sex partners, same-sex partners, partners for life. Great love knows no bounds. I used to say that love can cross borders, cross genders, even cross species. Love can have no limits at all: a feeling of total devotion, a feeling that makes you willing to give up everything, a feeling… Every man wants to be the first man his woman loves, and every woman wants to be the last woman her man loves. That’s what they call love. What is love? Are we trying to explain the meaning of love, or tell her stories? I think the meaning. Since the beginning of time, every single human being has had a love story. With as many people as grains of sand, and as many stories as grains of sand, when could we ever finish telling them all? What is love? She is a long, long epic that can never be fully written or fully told, as if she runs all the way to the far end of humanity. Loving each other isn’t that easy. Everyone has their own temper. Some people want their love to last forever in this world, but the moment you’re gone, your love, just like you, becomes the past, nothing more than an electrical signal flashing across the universe, gliding past without a trace. Some say love is romantic. She certainly is. What is love? There’s no right answer in this world. Love doesn’t need you to say thank you to the other person, but it does need you to give them everything, the happy and the unhappy, the joyful and the joyless, the blissful and the miserable. Love is just that strange. She doesn’t need the other person to remind you, yet the other person can give you exactly what you want. Love: thinking of him, you grin like a fool; thinking of her, you think of every last thing about her. What is love? The love I believe in is just you and me, and then, me and you. PS: I’m going to Shanghai on the 13th, so blog updates will slow down.