A few musings on love:
Love, like anything else in this world worth having, requires work. It is not temporary passion, obsession, lust. It requires sacrifice, patience, and forgiveness. It weathers the bad patches.
It also requires self-love. No one can truly love anyone unless he first loves himself.
There is no such thing as unconditional love...maybe from a baby (but that is more need); possibly from a dog (but I suspect even a dog that is beaten enough will run or bite back). But two mature people always have conditions. Everyone has a bottom line. And that is good. Love must always have a bottom line.
One of my favourite quotes about love is from the movie DODSWORTH: "Love has got to stop somewhere short of suicide."
That does not mean love doesn't get messy or angry at times.
I also loved Donald Sutherland's scene with Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People when he tells her: "You could never stand the mess."
A couple more quotes about love:
From THE REAL THING by Tom Stoppard:
"I use you because you love me. I love you so use me. Be indulgent, negligent, preoccupied, premenstrual...your credit is infinite, I'm yours, I'm committed...It's no trick loving someone at their best. Love is loving them at their worst."
From Oscar Wilde's THE IDEAL HUSBAND: "It is not the perfect, but the imperfect who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us -- else what use is love at all? All sins, except the sin against itself, love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, love should pardon."
And perhaps Mr. Porter put it best:
I am dejected,
I am depressed,
Yet ressurrected
And sailing the crest
Why this elation,
Mixed with deflation?
What explanation?
I am in love!
Such conflicting questions ride
Around in my brain,
Should I order cyanide
Or order champagne?
Oh, what is this sudden jolt?
I feel like a frightened colt,
Just hit by a thunderbolt,
I am in love!
I knew the odds
Were against me before.
I had no flair
For flaming desire,
But since the gods
Gave me you to adore,
I may lose
But I refuse to fight the - fire!
So come and enlighten my days
And never depart.
You only can brighten the blaze
That burns in my heart.
For I am wildly in love with you,
And so in need of
A stampede of
Love!
P.S., td, I...as a screenwriter...try to use the words "I love you" as rarely as possible. There are so many more interesting ways to express the emotion.