love love love

Sonnet CXVI- William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

i am afraid, this is the rare occasion in which you may be half-wrong Shakespeare. Only God-love is an absolute, an ever-fixed mark. as you say. And God's love, if one has not experienced it fully, comprehended completely, exists only consciously in one's imagination as an ideal perfection. Of course, God-lovers would see him everywhere- in the florid movements of nature and the peanut butter sandwich breakfast.

But most other forms of love, natural loves- expand their definitions with experience. i may think i love a man, but when i come to know him, and acquaint myself with his flaws, my love for him would take on a different facet- the love would change, be tainted in some way, may fade in others, and yet may also strengthen in a subtler way if i reconcile myself to imperfection. Love is an expandable balloon- just as fragile, as malleable, as absorbent.

"Love? What is love? There is no such thing. There are only loves and their differences."