by Renee Morway

Created on: July 11, 2008

What is love?

Love is elusive. It is like the adept chameleon, ever-changing, and it morphs into many guises throughout life's stages.

Childhood: When we are children, love is a bed-time story or a pat on the head. It is attention. Our masterpiece stuck to the cluttered refrigerator door is love. It is recognition. Love whispers from the cookie Grandma slips us before dinner and Uncle Joe's slight-of-hand dollar. Love is family.

Adolescence: During adolescence, family love is the basso continuo to our solo performance life. Yet, love's attention and recognition guises grow hungrier. We crave them in the forms of acceptance from our peers and desire from our romantic interests. Love, the adept chameleon, now morphs into a captivator. It is sex. It is lust. It is passion. When we succumb to it, it writhes into a violently thrashing serpent. Love is jealousy.

Young Adulthood: A hodgepodge of love's guises (attention, recognition, family, sex, lust, passion, and jealousy) tumbles into our young adulthood like fish dropping from a waterfall. They flap in the still waters of our bewilderment. Erratically, they dart and glide looking to settle. The crafty chameleon takes advantage of this need to settle. Love is togetherness, relationship, commitment, marriage, and faithfulness. It is monogamy. It is, once again, family.

Adulthood: As we live with love for our families, we struggle to live with all of the contradictory guises love has burrowed within us. Some win the struggle and maintain a happy marriage. Others lose the struggle. Their monogamous relationship wanes into boredom and complacency. Yet love's guises of sex, lust and passion are well-rooted within them. This conflict leads to adultery and the violently thrashing serpent reappears. Love is pain. It is torture. Families crumble.

At some point in our adult lives, whether we maintain or lose relationships, most of us realize that the concept of "to have and to hold" love is erroneous. Love is giving. You give it or it is voluntarily given to you. Either way, it is not to be gotten or possessed. Upon this realization, some people decide to give platonic love to the world and they become socially conscious. Love is charity.

Golden Years: The once adept chameleon's guises of sex, lust, and passion weaken. They captivate a person's spirit no longer. The violently thrashing serpent slithers away with them. Love reverts back to its childhood ways. It is attention. It is recognition. It is family.

Love is elusive for it

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