Someone recently asked me for advice on dealing with a broken heart. He defined his situation as one in which he'd, 'lost his love'. I asked if he was referring to love as an animate or inanimate object. He answered animate but was inkling towards inanimate. To him, I answered something like this:
I believe in different kinds of love. In life, one may come across many, a few, one or maybe even none.
There is the love that hurts and makes one weep.
The love that poisons and makes one sick.
The teenage love one looks back on and smiles.
The love that one cannot remember
and the love that is comfortable and easy.
Those are the different kinds of love I know. There is no use in trying to forget love. Love never dies. It's like a ghost, summoned by one of our senses to appear at a certain sight, sound, taste, touch or smell. Someone once told me, after a devastating break up, that I should mourn its end. Treat it as if it had physically died, eulogize it, cry, bury it and grieve. I did this. I wrote a eulogy for it and went and sat in the forest to mourn. I think I may have even worn black for awhile, after all, if you're going to do it you might as well do it right.
What have I learned?
Never compare the different kinds of love.
A broken heart will heal yet a scar will remain.
Sometimes a scar hurts if it's bumped.
Don't bother trying to forget.
Accept that there are different kinds of love of different intensities.
The best way to love is to allow someone to love you.
It takes a minute to have a crush on someone, an hour to like someone, and a day to love someone... but it takes a lifetime to forget someone. Khalil Gibran