by Joseph Whalen

Created on: May 17, 2010

Love is like a living breathing entity.  It is constantly evolving and changing, adapting to its environment.  Love has many personalities and many faces.  Much like men and women, love evolves through time.  A constant companion to us, sometimes enriching our lives and sometimes making us long for things that are simply out of our reach.  Love can bring us to the lowest points of despair in our lives or lift us to the highest joys imaginable.  Love is all these things at different times and for different reasons.

As children we experience love as simple, intuitive and clean.  We are blessed with the experience of unconditional love from our parents and we return that love as only a child is capable of.  Love is an elementary concept at this stage, introduced to us by our parents but a concept we try to impose on everything at an early age.  As a result love is naïve and indiscriminate, unaware of the evils of the world and untainted by other more complex emotions.  Love is primal and powerful, instinctive like only intelligent life can comprehend, but it is also fleeting and fragile.

Our teen years begin to distort our sense of love.  While there is still that ingrained love of our parents we become less dependent on that love and more selfish in how we administer our love. We begin to seek out the love of our peers at this stage and the initial stages of human bonding and mating begin as the rush of hormones quickly take over much of the cognitive connect we have with love.  We learn of the concept of not only loving but falling in love.  Though at this stage it is an idealistic impression generated mostly by popular media of the time and is more an amorous infatuation than what we will ultimately know as love.

By the time we’ve reach our young adult period we’ve experienced more of the world and can look on things without the rose colored glasses that distorted our youth.  We begin to see the world for what it is and we begin to understand the pain and hurt that is rampant in the world.  This often translates into lost love, or longing for forbidden love which we cannot have.  At this point we’ve all experience the primal rage that is a byproduct of jealousness and the seemingly unbearable pain of failed relationships.  We are a bit more hardened to the world, more aware of the pitfalls of live and possibly even a little unsure of how to navigate the

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