In the car on the way home from Goodbye Alexander Part One, we were talking about love.

Kellie thinks you can only be in love for real only once. Zak retold a story about a girl who was in love with love, who thought that each time you were in love was the really only true love, and that each new love invalidated each old love, no matter how real that love was to begin with; that is, each time you are in love is the only true one, until it happens again. Clif thinks that there are lots of complicating factors, that there isn't just ONE TRUE LOVE (R).

I didn't really chime in except to be generally negative, because, well...I don't have a lot of reasons in general to be positive about the subject. When we said love, we meant spousal, romantic love, not familial or friendship kinds of love.

This is probably not even something worth thinking about, because it's not relevant to my life currently, nor will it be relevant in the near future, but I just have no clue what love is all about. I think that you can conceivably love lot of different people (although maybe not at the same time), and that you can make marriage work with lots of different people.

Kellie said, "The kind of love where you make a choice or a decision, that only comes once." But I suppose if you're making the decision to love someone then you can do it as many times as you need to, with all sorts of people. I will grant that maybe there is a perfect person, although that really seems to be a matter of chance - being in the right place at the right time and saying the right thing and not being a total idiot. But it doesn't work that way for everyone, and lots of people just make it work.

I don't really know how to tell if you're in love. I'm pretty sure I was in love with this guy in high school. I never really stopped feeling affection for this person, and I never felt disdain for him, as I eventually did for the scads of young men who mostly scorned me. Even now, he was the only person who dealt with our friendship well, despite the fact that I was crazy about him.

In any case, I have few expectations. I'd really like to be a romantic, I think, but it hurts too damn much at this point.