You wake up painfully, your arm asleep and pinned underneath the neck of a new lover, wishing you could find a more comfortable position but dare not to disturb such a beautiful creature laying next to you. You repeat this process every hour throughout the night, restless because your bed and routine has been invaded by a new being, but trading sleep for adoration is an easy choice.

When you no longer notice the lover next to you, maybe there’s a problem.

You’re in the grips of a “vacation infatuation”, a short time spent with another without regard for protective feelings, shedding your baggage and opening yourself up fully to inevitable heartache. A year’s worth of intense gazes, intimacy and quieted conversations all condensed together by an extreme attractive pull, until it explodes and comes bursting apart in an exciting short-lived display. These are the relationships that teach you the most about yourself.

You spent the previous months keeping mostly to yourself, but knew you had to get out a couple of times a week, and try to make a connection. You throw yourself to the wolves night after night, spouting sentences you think you should say instead of the truth, carefully crafting every conversation to prevent showing weakness. Somehow, through it all, you have some small successes and try to advance them throughout the weeks.

The next weeks are an awful, sinking period of time when your calls and messages are ignored, when every weakness you know of is brought to your mind and agonized over and you hate them for not loving you, you hate yourself for not loving you, you feel as if you’ll never find anyone; a lost cause. You sink to a depth that becomes a comfortable drowning. You have failed enough, been rejected enough that you have all but given up and assumed there was something terribly wrong about you. You wish they’d just tell you they hated you; anything is better than silence.

Sometimes the silence persists to eternity, and you’re left with a feeling that you’re just a little bit less than you were before.

And sometimes you unexpectedly bump into someone that immediately connects with you, and by some fucking miracle, they seem to like you too. You think maybe you were wrong about yourself. You hope that she’s not just a poor judge of character.

You hold hands with her strolling through the zoo, and look at her with reciprocated infatuation, and though you may never love her, your belief in the idea of love is restored. The world is suddenly alight again, your head is always up, and your imagination returns. You’re in that wonderful and fragile period of time after meeting someone new, when you’re excited about everything they say, and when you’re apart, you look at your phone wondering if you should say something, anything, just to think about them, picture them smiling, and it makes you smile. Wouldn’t you want to spend as much of your life as possible in this period of time?

Love is not a static emotion; it is an ever-expanding and changing sense within us, and like every other sense of ours, we can improve it through practice. We can flex and hone it like everything else, and it becomes easier and easier to love.

The ability to love is improved through habit.

When you become better at something, the iceberg that is You becomes lighter and more buoyant; it floats a little higher and reveals just a little more of a person than before. When Love becomes easier to attain, the unit of measurement we use to describe it becomes wider to accommodate the increased range of experience. In other words, your idea of love becomes redefined with every relationship. This means that you could have the same feelings for a person at two different times of your life and yet only describe one of those feelings as Love. There are very few absolutes in our human world; every feeling we have is simply a comparison from one state of being to another. Without anything to hurt us, we would not know Fear, and without anything to heal us, we would not know Love.

But this short-term courtship cannot last; it must come to an end sooner or later. The days after the inevitable parting of lovers is filled with an empty feeling and at first seems to make the lows lower than ever before. You wander from room to room, wondering what the hell you’re going to do next, feeling as if the world has somehow quietly ended overnight, and nobody notified you. The King fell to his knees, and the Queen is nowhere to be found.

Time does not heal, at-least not by itself.

Place a lovesick man in a solitary dark cell, only left to contemplate his current state of being, and he will remain a disheveled prisoner forever.
Nay, time does not heal: distractions do. Curing one love simply means distracting the mind until another one arrives. One might argue that this marginalizes the feeling of love. Maybe the short-term love is not a real love; maybe it’s fake and fleeting and disappears within days and weeks and years. Maybe it’s not love but something else, a cruel trick played by nature. But faced with a decision between guarded loneliness and a lifetime of heart-carving, explosive relationships, the choice is easy.