Here are two comments I made to a friend's post somewhere.
I love other people because I can't not love them. It is a part of who I am at this stage of my life. It's more unconditional and less demanding. I love. Period.
Other people are either decent human beings or total jerks I should remove from my life. Love doesn't play a part in whether someone is a jerk or awesome, though.
Love is the easy part. It is like breathing. Of course, this view of things is directly contrary to how love is presented in popular Western culture. The Beatles have it dead wrong: Love is never all you need -- just as air alone is never all you need.
So... how about loving the person and seeing the potential in a person, but also remembering that neither that love nor that potential may mean anything to the other person -- and that is still totally fine. Sometimes all we can do is plant the seeds of change.
As I grow older, I find I care less and less about potential. I don't care if anyone sees the potential in a person. Potential is ultimately meaningless because it never really exists. What matters is what gets manifested, not what could be manifested. Show me a good, honest, creative person -- not someone with the potential to be good, the potential to be honest, or the potential to be creative.
Then later:
As a tender-hearted person, I embrace both the love and the pain and tears. I cry easily, but if it is the price to pay for loving the way I do then I feel it is well worth it. Love is worth it. Not for any other person so much as for me, personally.
If there's one person you should love unconditionally, it is yourself. Just like when dealing with external dangers: first focus on you, then you'll be in a place you can help others. Loving yourself unconditionally is never an excuse to put aside personal growth, as loving others is never an excuse for their behavior.
So, I love and I am hurt. I cry. I weep. I keep loving all the same.
If someone's perfume triggers an asthma attack the solution isn't to just hold your breath when you're around anyone you don't explicitly trust. Sometimes people fart and it stinks. Sometimes even dear people could forget -- or be too close to someone on a bus -- and show up wearing a stink that triggers the throat to close. Still, we must breath. Even corpses exchange gases with their environment -- there is just no stopping it.
You really have two choices: embrace love and learn to cope with the pain that comes with it, or to try to constrain and restrict love, to be less familiar with it and consequentially to be more surprised and startled when things are unexpected or go awry. -- Well, a third choice would be to entirely discount love and embrace Randian Objectivity...
(Yes, I am usually this verbose with social media posts.)
