<#290 Desk Column>
Are You Falling in Love?
By Lim Seon-hye, Head Student Editor
Recently I met a friend who was frustrated because of the pain of a broken heart. “What a silly thing love is!” she said, “It is always telling you things that are not going to happen, and making you believe things that are not true.” As she said, love is uncertain and invisible. Even so, once you have fallen in love with someone, you cannot restore your reason easily. I love my parents, sister, and friends. Many students also love their boy or girlfriend. Then, what is love?
We initiate our love for someone from an overflow of passion, which is caused by very powerful feelings of arousal and attraction. It is what makes you fall ‘in love’ and is the feeling most associated with love. Unlike parents or close friends, many students may feel strong passion at first when falling in love with their boy or girlfriend. Unfortunately, this kind of feeling almost always diminishes over time. However it is still essential to initiating a romantic relationship. Intimacy, the feeling of being close and connected to someone, is essential to staying in love. It is developed through sharing and very good communication over time. Another thing that is essential to staying in love is commitment, which frequently requires some hard work and determination. It refers to a conscious decision to stay with a person both in good and bad times.
Although we say love is useless, we ultimately cannot live without it. In his book, A Week at the Airport, A Heathrow Diary, French novelist, Alain de Botton wrote: “We may spend the better part of our professional lives projecting strength and toughness, but we are all in the end creatures of appalling fragility and vulnerability. Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few who hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.”
Love is initiated with passion and lasts with intimacy and commitment. Making love last is the most important thing of all. I think love is like baking bread; we have to keep a constant eye on it so that it doesn’t become too dry or hard. When you fall in love, you need to make efforts to maintain it. Otherwise you just get stale bread. These days, I met many friends, seniors and juniors expressing their loneliness. I hope everyone falls in love with someone with passion, intimacy and commitment.