Wow! Here's a reflection on an outdated topic! Or am I just being skeptical? Well, however you want to classify the mood radiating from this little write-up, a number of you may agree with a few or all points made, and some of you may think this is absolute junk. Fair enough. So here goes:

Have you ever considered the fact that being in love with someone is not necessarily the same thing as loving someone? I can vaguely remember reading or hearing somewhere ? and what?s more important: I am convinced that it's true ? that people are first "in love" with someone and then, eventually "love" that person. Being "in love," then, is the heart pounding, hand palm-sweating phase when all your mind can do is thinking of that person you are enthralled with at the moment. You are in a mesmerized state of mind; a daze that makes everything else seems unreal and unimportant. And it's only gradually that this bedazzlement winds down and either evaporates into insignificance, or transforms into the deep mature love that people share when they have been together in good emotional standing for quite some time.

As a logical sequence to this, one could conclude that you first have to fall out of love with one person before you can fall in love with another. However - and men may understand this part better than women - you could be capable of loving one person and being in love with another. Confusing? Not really. Just read it a few times if it doesn't sound right at first.

Is the above stated a rule of thumb? Not by any means!
Does it make me an expert on the topic, even if you agree? Even further from that!
In my opinion love issues are, like all other, subject to one's unique perception.
And even if you consider my hypothesis on human's ability to be both deeply in love with one partner, and yet sincerely love another partner a true one, we still don't have a valid solution to the problem that rises in modern society. For in our "monogamous" (read: hypocritical), "civilized" world it's hardly accepted for one person to have more than one partner. Have I now exclaimed here that I am a proponent of people having more than one lover? Surely not! But we cannot ignore the fact that it is a widespread phenomenon of which the existence is simply denied.

I remember reading a magazine article once, in which a female author was trying to explain to her audience that men can be perfectly happy in their marriage and still have affairs in between. Women, on the other hand, only start an extramarital affair when they are unhappy in some regard in their steady relationship. In my opinion this theory is true in great lines. But does this mean that the abovementioned extramarital affairs, whether initiated as icing on the marriage cake (by men), or entire cake-surrogate (by women), require the participants to be in love? Or is there really a third possibility: being in lust?

If this is true, then we have this little overview to consider:
· You love your spouse that you've been happily married to during the past 20 years.
· You are in love with your sweetheart who provides you the listening ear, the tenderness, the time and the devotion that you don't get at home for some reason.
· You are in lust with the sexy secretary from the office next door or the hunk that jogs by every morning when you drive off to work.

But you know what? You are monogamous, because you were unfortunate enough to be born as a member of a society that does not allow the last two. Thus, you sneak away with them in a dark corner if you are a daredevil, and you just dream about them and picture them in place of your steady partner if you're not. The only alternative to you in any other case would be: to fall out of love with the one you've lived with for the longest time, and jump into the excitement of the partner you can be "in love" with. The sexy looking "in lust" figure is unfortunately the least important: lusts can be taken care of in many ways, even without the subject being near...

The love issue is indeed a complex and never experienced in the same way by two people. But if any of the nonsensicalities above were true... where would you want to stand? And where do you really stand?