Man...I Am So Mushy Lately

It amazes me sometimes the way love can overwhelm me. Overwhelm me like I can't believe how good it feels to love someone so much, or how much it hurts to have someone taken or not love me back, or how it feels to have someone else love you or be in love with you.

I often tell people that I love them. Even people that I maybe haven't known for any great length of time, but rather only a few months, because I do.

I have never, once in my life, uttered the words "I love you" when I didn't mean it. Never. A male friend of mine once said that I throw those words around too casually, to which I was astonished. How could I be "throwing" those words around if I really meant them? He confessed that he only felt someone deserved to be told that after a relationship had been firmly established, over many years and ups and downs. Telling people he loved them was an awkward thing.

I, on the other hand, feel that it should be shared whenever the mood strikes me. It is often said to friends in a sing-songy voice - sometimes after they have said something particularly sweet, or made me laugh in a way that only they can make me do - that I'm overwhelmed with feelings of love for that person and I will say "Oh man, you are so funny, I love you!" I always mean it, because I really do love that person - and at that moment in time they did something for me to think it was appropriate to let them know.

Being in love, the delivery is quite different. Besides the obvious times when people say "I love you" - when they're leaving for work, when they're on their way to "the deed", before they hang up the phone - I will often be overwhelmed with those feelings while I'm listening to them talk, or watching them do something, cooking, reading, etc. and have to tell them.
They can be in the middle of a sentence, telling me about something exciting that happened to them, totally oblivious to the fact that I am so awestruck by what an amazing person they are - and as I'm listening or watching I'm thinking "oh wow, I love you" with such intensity that I can't always say the words. Sometimes I just watch with a little smile on my face, thinking how lucky I am to have them in my life and to feel the way I do about them.

There are also times in my life when I wish I didn't love people so much. Times when I've had to cut myself off, times when my heart felt that it would break from the pain of losing them - those times when I wish so much that I didn't know them at all, because the pain of losing them is too much to bear. Of course, I always realize that the fact that I met that person at all is a gift, and that even if they have to leave my life, I'm still lucky to have loved them.

I have been feeling all kinds of intense love lately, love that makes me so happy and so sad at the same time that I'm not really sure what to do with it. For some reason my "love senses" have been drastically heightened...