Is It Really Better to Have Loved and Lost?

A few days ago, I went online in search of an answer to the question "Is it better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all?" I was hoping for some sort of Harvard study that would itemize the benefits that the euphoric feeling of "in love" brought to the physical human, instead what I found were literally thousands of other people asking the same question.

While I wasn't able to find any concrete evidence that loving and losing is physically better than never loving, what I did find out made me go "Hmm..." I found out that the statement, "Loving/Never Loving" is actually part of a poem written by Tennyson and not a derivative of a long ago scientific study. (Which also goes to show that I need to research more of those "sayings" that have been ingrained in us from birth.)

It has always interested me how writers have become the literary "geniuses" that we all study and applaud. I've never been able to figure out exactly how their voice became the applauded works that should be studied and forced down the college students throat for hundreds of years. Believe me, the first generation learned the lesson and some improved upon it, the second generation improved upon theirs, the third took it a step further, and so on and so on and so on until you have present day. There are people out there that have done it better!

I understand learning the principle, I don't understand stopping at the one lesson and keeping it there.

But I have largely digressed from where I was going into a personal rant, so I'll veer back.

No, I lied, I'm going back. Do you know how many millions upon millions upon millions of people applaud Danielle Steele's books? Read them faithfully? Every three a year she cranks out? Man oh man, I've read three and feel like I've read them all. Same pattern, same plot, just different characters. Yet, other authors that do it better are barely mentioned. Seriously, Judith McNaught is a great example. She doesn't have 300 books, but the 20 she's written are works of art. Dean Koontz is, in my opinion, a better writer than Stephen King, but you wouldn't know it to listen to the "critics". (Haha, speaking of critics, I just got an email from Dean Koontz- his newsletter. In it he talks about a critic that gave him a great review of his book Midnight. The whole thing was fantastic, right up to the last line where the critic had written that DK was a master at the Vampire plot line. Dean Koontz wrote that he had never, to his knowledge, written a vampire book and it had been very obvious that the critic had not even opened the book to get the faintest idea of what it was about.

So he had him killed.

LOL... I cracked up. Too funny.)

Alright, it's obvious from my digression that I have a bad feeling for critics. What's not obvious is that I am perfectly capable of getting BACK ON TOPIC!

Loved and Lost

So, since I have no scientific data to back up the question, I'll try to answer it myself. Is it really better?

I do not love easily. I don't know why, but think that it has a lot to do with my ability to compartmentalize people and situations. For instance, it does not matter how well I know you in one aspect, if you put yourself in another I cannot relate with you. My brain has to search for a way to make you fit. If I know you at work, I have a hard time transitioning to fitting you into my personal life... and vice versa. (When I die, I'm going to donate my brain to science so that they can dissect it and figure out how all my wires got crossed and screwed up my programming. I'm like a computer with a virus-- I work fine, but if you go into a certain file it's catastrophe.)

That being said, when I love, I love hard. If a person has managed to storm past all of those barriers so that I can't keep them in a compartment, I love deep and I love for a long time.

I don't know about other people, but for me it's hard to get over loving someone. The things that I loved about them, I always love about them because I'm able to overlook the qualities that maybe I didn't like so much. Maybe they're assholes, but if they have fantastic redeeming virtues I'm hooked. Which makes losing them like a nuclear bomb to my soul.

Personally, I would rather not have loved at all. Maybe.

I once had a teacher who asked us what we thought the one thing was that no human could live without. As you may have guessed, most of the people in the room responded "Love". Some said water, which was a good answer, but I think the teacher meant for the long term. LOL

Anyway, his answer was "Hope". Hope to love, hope to live, hope to find water. Hope is the one thing that our souls depend upon.

So, when we look at losing love, is it the death of that affection that slowly kills us, or is it the slow death of hope? The hope of its return. The hope of finding it again.

The three times that I've loved and lost, to the extent where a person would conceivably ask the question, have all been different circumstances. One was a child and two were, what I believed to be, good friends. Each loss has left me a lot scarred and very afraid of the flame. It has left behind a fear unlike any other and caution to go forth once again.

And while I remember with too much clarity what it was like to be with them, and the good feelings of being with them, these only serve as pokers when I remember them- making me believe that it would be better to not have the memories. But then again... if asked, now that I have them, I wouldn't trade them for the world.

Confusing, huh?

Maybe it's hope rearing it's ugly head once again. Maybe, it's the certainty of knowing that feelings of loss will fade and the hope that those memories will finally bring a smile to your face, instead of pain to your heart. Which brings another long held saying to mind... Hope springs eternal...

So, to you reading this, what do you think? Can you answer the question or give an example? Is it really better?