Everybody talks about love. It comes up in late-night discussions between good friends, the kind that arrive after a good five hours of laughs and bullshit have passed. Your stomachs hurt from laughing, and either of you have the energy to keep up that "I'm doing okay" routine that most of us have running in the background, quietly informing our friends that we're not basket cases even if we're joking about it….

….And for a while, you're honest.

You sit down, turn off the TV, and get down to the real stuff — why you're unhappy with life (everyone is, at least a little bit), where you went wrong in the past, and you talk about love.

But some folks treat love with a capital "L," and it's a little scary listening to them discuss how they're going to find it.

You can see it in their eyes, a hard flinty look that tells you that they know love isn't just an emotion — it's a physical thing, a book with rules they haven't divined yet, and when they find love they'll feel it in every core of their being. They've been raised on tales of Lancelot, and they see themselves as protectors — flawed in some ways, aimless, but they know that if they stay true to their home-brewed morals the grail will eventually turn up.

"I know I'll find her," they say. "Someday."

The conversation then inevitably turns to how they haven't found her yet. Oh, they've dated, in a series of disastrous consequences. They find someone and go steady almost immediately, then cling closely because This Is Love. The girl invariably sneaks off somewhere and punctures the relationship with some sort of betrayal, and they're alone again.

"It started off well," they sigh. "I don't know what happened."

The problem is, of course, that they were dating ghosts.

A lot of people — particularly guys, but it happens to women, too — never actually see the person they're dating. The actual person they're making love to is hidden behind a shifting curtain of desires and hopes, spurred by a frantic desire to be In Love.

Because for these people, Love is forever — it's so big that it must consume every part of your being. You cannot be a little bit in Love; it's gotta sweep you up whole, man, and if you're thinking about mundane things like "Is this person really trustworthy?" or "Do we really have anything in common?", then that's a betrayal of everything Love is.

Love will heal you; if you're with the perfect person, they'll make you whole. Love will patch you up like you're a roofing project, baby, replacing those broken psychological shingles and slapping a new coat of paint on the front. Love connects you to someone, and that connection erases the problems you have.

Love is soulmates, and flowers. Love transcends the shitty little games we play with each other; if you're in love, that stuff goes away. Love is the proof that everything you believe in just goddamn works.

And you know, if Love does all that stuff, then wouldn't you be desperate to be in Love?

You know, with anybody?

So of course these people are desperate to have anyone who can find them, to start this Love process as soon as possible. But there's a tragic problem here — Love fixes things, remember? So when they fall in Love with someone, that person is mystically transformed.

You see, falling in Love with someone who was flawed would mean that well, you weren't really in Love. Love's for a lifetime, and you can't be in Love with someone who's got serious psychological issues that would, if you looked at them honestly, drive you batshit in the long run. So when your friends shuffle their feet nervously and mutter, "Dude, she kind of cheated on her last two boyfriends," you don't listen — that won't be a problem, because Love will fix it!

And when they start to realize that their girlfriend hasn't held a job in six months because she's tired of working, that's not an issue — they're a protector anyway. It's their job to ensure to tolerate as many of her quirks and behaviors as possible. If they really Loved someone, this wouldn't be an issue.

Thus, the Lovers never see the person they're dating. Any flaws they have? Mystically erased, or transformed into something they have to understand and accept. They don't see the whole person — they're dating someone whose best qualities are artificially inflated, and whose worst qualities they never even notice….

….until it's too late.

Post-relationship, another miraculous thing happens — this wasn't Love. How could it be? It failed. Love doesn't fail. Love's big-time, baby. Love's still on the train track, comin' right for them, some day. You don't know how or when she changed so drastically, but that's just something all your girlfriends have in common - they're never quite what they seemed like when you started dating them, shimmering like a mirage in desert heat.

But that's the problem. Love is fucking mundane. It's not nice to say, but love can — and should — be affected by trivial things like, say, your partner's inability to pay the rent or whether you actually enjoy the same movies. Love's largely about the little courtesies.

Because Love's not an independent process, flying high above the other emotions without support; it's held up by a gigantic pillar of Like, as in "I like who I'm married to." Without Like, everything begins to fray around the edges. The tragedy of lower-"l" love is that you can love the shit out of someone, and still not be able to trust them or hang around them without getting into screaming fights.

What saves you is like. If anything, you should be enamored of "Like," as in "If I didn't Love this person, would I Like them? Would I want to be friends with this person if she wasn't willing to be in a relationship with me?" Like should be your grail, not Love.

Truth is, you don't know whether you really like someone until you can look at them honestly as a full bundle, with both flaws and benefits, to see who they really are.

Until then, you're gonna be dating Samara. And don't be surprised at the results.

(NOTE: This could apply to three separate people on my friends' list. It's not about you personally. But you should prolly listen anyway.)

(174 shouts of denial | Tell me I'm full of it)