Sacrifices for Love

“The world turns on the emotions of love”.  That’s quiet a bold statement considering that our egos like to believe that there is order and purpose to our decisions, rather than viewing ourselves as uncontrollable slobbering emotional wrecks. 

The truth is apparent once you look a little deeper, past the surface of your daily routine.  Why do we do the things we do?  Why do we go to the places we go? Why do we choose those certain friends, careers, or neighborhoods?  It’s all in the name of love.  There is something we love about everything that defines our lives, because if we did not love it, then it would not be a part of our circle of life.

We make all sorts of sacrifices for love everyday.  As a simple example: I live in a tropical climate because I love the beach, but I sacrifice living in the city in which I grew up (the big apple) so that I can lounge on a warm sun filled beach year round.  This was a big sacrifice for me, since I am a city girl at heart and I love NYC!  Of course there are far greater sacrifices that are made everyday.  One of the most difficult are the ones we make for the relationships that we cherish and ultimately place before all else in our lives.

Love keeps us in relationships that should have been ended a long time ago.  Love gives us hope, and that hope gives us a reason to stay in a place or with a person that should have been cut from our lives a long time ago.  This holds true not only for a lover or spouse, but also for a parent or even a child that treats us badly and abuses our unconditional love. 

Love keeps us in a job that should have been left behind years ago, not for the love of the job, but for the love of the things that job brings us.  The love of money to start with, but it’s so much more than just the money that holds us to our jobs.  It’s the love of the circle of friends we amass at work, or the love of the title we hold, and even the miserable commute that we love to complain about.

Love is the fuel for wars.  The catalyst for putting our lives on the line, or at the lives of the brave soldiers that are willing to put their lives on the line for our untiring love for the ideal that we are fighting for.  We demand to prove our love at all costs. 

Love is a very dangerous emotion, it can make us sacrifice our own identities until we no longer recognize ourselves.  In the pursuit of love we allow good judgement to fly out the window, leaving our hearts torn wide open and eternally scarred by the sacrifices we make for love.  “I wish that I were able to direct my heart, and the love it shares, towards a more peaceful direction, but I have learned the hard way that love has a mind of it’s own and will always go exactly where it desires.