All you need is love - or is it ?

I wonder if i've just become too old for love or whether our notion of love changes as we age. I'm sure its both - though I hate to admit (to myself more than anyone else) that I could ever become too old for "love". I've been a person whose life and life choices in particular have revolved around so called love. Maybe its that overdose that has killed the strive for finding that perfect love anymore.

But this is not really a cribbing session ! Just more of a statement of the way life is today and I'm trying to figure out how I came to this state and whether this is really equilibrium ... or death of a me that used to be. At a point some 19 years ago, life was about finding love - the most romanticized version of it. My head was filled with all the stories that I had been reading for years and even though I had never read a Mills and Boons in my life, it was more the sophisticated version of love , of true longing and desire and of a reason to live. It really wasnt so much about finding a knight in shining armour coming and saving the day , but it was about finding that perfect soul mate to live with , for the the rest of your life - day for day , to really find the meaning of eternity - to share who you are and infuse it into someone else ... There was so much to look forward to 20 years ago - your whole life lay ahead of you like a book waiting to be written and it somehow seemed so important to find that 'perfect' person to pen that story with ...

20 years since, life has what one calls it "settled" down through so many phases and ups and downs and finally probably for the first year in my adult existence so to say, I'm not spending a year "searcing" for love - and I dont mean literally , but even searching within known realtionships. Its become about accepting life and love the way it is - even if it means accepting no love in the definition that I knew it to be which was all about sharing every bit of your emotions unabashedly, your desire , about true passion that simply engulfs you and leaves room for nothing else in those moments. But now its more about going through life, about restraint of emotions, about balance and about being busy to a point that there's no time for thinking about such love really - the existence or lack of it. But more importantly most of the time I dont even miss it .. or consciously think about it. The definition of love has become more of adjustment, of sharing responsibility, of just being there at the beginning or end of the day even without too much to say to each other necessarily.

But sometimes when I escape in my dreams , I weep .. I weep for that missing of a heartbeat when I would meet my love. When literally speaking , the ground under my feet would slip away from me and I would drown in a quicksand of emotion - of either love, jealousy, desire , passion .. I miss being able to feel so intense - to actually believe that this was all that mattered and nothing else, that there was indeed a word called eternity, called forever.

To reach a point where you know things will come and go - events, people, feelings ,. that really nothing is permanent , that life is just about this non permanance of things just kills me. But I feel good about being able to accept that graciously because it is a huge change for me , and absolute opposite to what I believed in for so many years.

But thats why I feel I've become too old for love. Because I think your body has a self defense mechanism where it actually creates this armour around your heart as it ages - because it simply become more brittle with time and you can't survive those heart breaks that were enevr easy to go through , but you had the stamina to actually survive them ! I dont think I do anymore. But who knows , we'll find out if I've really crossed the bridge alotgether or this is a temporary phenomenon ...

as I write this , the Beatles tune "All you Need is Love, love , love - Love is all you need" keeps on humming through my head , and though I have become matured to not believe it blindly any more , deep in my heart I know that is probably still true - its just the form that changes !