Love Is a Forge

Like a forge, real love transforms mercurial adoration into something everlasting.

Love holds a privileged position in our hearts and minds. It is the be-all and end-all of relationships. It’s the strongest connection two people can form, to love one another. But when does attraction, liking someone, and really, really liking someone become “love”?

What even is love? For some people it seems to be mostly fear, fear of losing someone. For others, it is joy — joy that another person exists, joy at being in contact with that existence. For yet others, it is anger, a fiery fight to hold onto someone and get them to love you as you want to be loved. And sometimes it is sadness, a heartbreaking resignation that your love is unrequited or its object vanished. But, most of all, it’s all of these things. Love is an intense sensitivity of all the emotions to the object of our devotion.

Yet, if we view love as a purely emotional concept, we achieve no threshold, only degrees of difference between really liking someone and loving them. I believe love should, instead, be viewed by its endurance: Love is permanent. This establishes an easy litmus test: If a day ever comes when you can say to yourself that you don’t love that person, then you never did.

Many people, I assume, will find this criteria objectionable, mostly cause it will make many of the experiences they’ve called “love” inadmissible. Well, to some I say La Rochefoucauld spoke truth when he said: “There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing.” To others, I say a clarification is in order. Love is initially an intense sensitivity of the emotions to the object of their devotion, but in time it becomes something more. It becomes an appreciation of existence, a simple, enduring gratitude. The fire that melts steel cannot burn forever, but the steel, once transformed, can hold that shape for time illimitable. Love moves from the fire to the steel, from the emotional to the imperishably appreciative. Love is an emotional forge.

I would describe it in this way: If you truly loved someone, it’s impossible to ever forget the beauty you saw in them. You cannot look at them and regret your past devotion. Your mind is now incapable of seeing that person as anything other than singular and valuable — it was wrought that way in the fire. This love is immutable; it’s incapable of being surprised; it’s incapable of being betrayed. No matter how far the object of its affection may have fallen, no matter how tattered life has left that person, no matter what ugliness has creeped into them or has finally shown itself creeping out of them, you cannot fail to see what you once saw there — an eternally burning ember of singular, unmatched beauty. Inextinguishable gratitude that such a person exists, or once did, is the token of love, the forge.

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