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.
Nay, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to ever 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.
-Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

Is it Love, or merely Habit?

Love. It's one of the single most powerful words in the human language. It is the guiding force in all of our relationships, actions, and lives. We love ourselves, our families, our friends, our significant others, our homes, our pets, our neighbors, our land, our country, our world, our planet and even our universe. We love the animate and the inanimate. I love chocolate, chicken strips, Aquafina, and jalapeno poppers. I love the movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I love my piano, especially when it's playing Beethoven or Chopin. I love the rain. I love the feeling of an adventure, or fulfilling a challenge.

It's easy to say what we love. Yet love remains the most abstract, intangible, and indefinable element in our world.

And since it is something we cannot define, how do we know if it's real? How do we know it isn't just a habit...something we've become so accustomed to that we feel we don't know how to live without it?

How do you know if that boy or girl you've deemed the love of your life is really that? How do you know that you haven't just become used to their attentions, their presence, the way they make you feel?

I've always followed the advice of someone way long ago- if you have to ask, then you're not in love. If you love someone, then you just know. It's not an issue, it's not a doubt. You love them, and every fiber of your being knows it is true.

It may seem inconsequential, this question of love or habit. If you're in love and you're happy, the distinction seems irrelevant. But what if you're trying to get out of love? What if you're no longer with that person, and you're forced to deal with the leftovers? If it's real love, it won't just go away. And if time eventually does drive them from your mind, does that mean it never really was love in the first place? Was it just a habit? And now that you're broken up, forced to go cold turkey and face the withdrawals alone, does that mean you're just picking up a new habit? The habit of being single again?

In the movie Notting Hill, Will (Hugh Grant) describes his breakup with Anna (Julia Roberts) as "I've been given Love Heroin, and now I'm forced to go without." If love is an addiction, and thereby an extreme habit, how do we ever know it's real? Or is it like he says, when you find the right person, it's like finding the right drug. The people you date and don't like at all are the equivalent of ingesting some excedrin or vitamin B. You get a slight rush at first, but then you don't feel a thing. Those that end up being friends are like vitamin C- good for you, but not really mood altering. And you know it's serious when you get into the hardcore stuff, like the people you love for years and years who are the cocaines and heroins and nicotines- the lifelong addictions that either kill you or stay forever.

After the breakup, when you either recover from the withdrawals or don't, is the only time you can really tell if it was meant to be a lifelong addiction. Years later when you still crave it, still dream about it, would that tell you it was real? I mean, if you can recover from it, then it must not be the love of your life that you can't live without, right?

It seems that a breakup is implied in all of this. In order to ever know that your love is real, you must leave it at some point, try to go without, and see if you can live without that other person. And if the pain goes away, and you get on with your life, then it must not be it, right?

But how long do you wait? A month? A year? Ten years? In the tv show Sex and the City, Charlotte says that it takes half as long as you were together to get over the person. What if you were together ten years, and five years later you're still not over them, what in the hell good does that do you to know? You're probably not getting back together after 5 years apart, so even though you've got the REAL LOVE knowledge, you're still screwed.

But it seems there's no other way. The only way to know if it's not just a habit is to try to break it. If you do, and you still want them, if you still feel the love, then it was real. And if not, if the habit is gone and so is the love, then it never was anything more.

This seems impractical too. If you're in the relationship and it's really bugging you whether it's real or not, you run a big risk in saying anything equivalent to "Honey, we need to break up for a while to see if our love is real or not..." It happens, but you run the risk of losing them.

Then again, if we follow the old adage, if you have to ask...well...

Breaking the Habit

So it's Cold Turkey Time, and you're going through withdrawals. How do you heal? What is the post-love equivalent of the methadone they give heroin addicts? Is it like people say, and time heals all wounds? The people I've spoken to list several remedies- everything from removing (and possibly burning) everything and anything that belonged to that person. Others say you have to get out and make yourself happy (which is such a conveniently generic statement it makes you want to punch them in the face...like the people who say "whatever is meant to be will be." Thanks for the wisdom you fuckers). Another person suggested sleeping with as many people as possible, to put the biggest distance between that relationship and now. Others said starve and work out 5 hours a day- make yourself beautiful (I guess becoming anorexic would certainly be a distraction from the pain of the breakup).

And yet, that's what it is- all of those solutions are distractions. All of those solutions basically imply a breaking of the habit. Anything to get you out of your old life, anything that changes as much as possible about it, and gives you a new one. But what about the biggest habit of all? What about the habit in your brain of constantly thinking about that person, of constantly being reminded of them, seeing them in every familiar place?

And the big solution is...well...hell if I know. If it was just a habit, then you'll be healed a lot sooner than if it was real.

I guess the bigger question is would you rather be healed and happy now, or know that you have tasted that intangible and seemingly unattainable element of true love?