the thing about love
is that it poses an eternal quandary of the difference between the Who and the What. what is love? is it the love of something or someone? do we love someone for the absolute singularity of who that someone is, or do we love the qualities? do we love someONE ("I love you because you are you") or someTHING ABOUT someone ("I love you because of your temperament, your hotness, your intelligence, etc")?
but once we try to answer that, we run into intractable problems of being. because the question is, is it possible to love someone, as opposed to merely the characteristics of that one? what does it mean, to love someone as opposed to loving something about someone? the question of Being - ontology - lies at the core of so much of philosophy: not Being for itself, but Being for Others. for love. consequences. implications.
it's why relationships are so contained unto themselves: why, in discussing a relationship with an Other not involved in it, conveyance seems insurmountable. no story will do total justice to the inside being of a relationship; better, surely, to say nothing, or risk inevitable prevarication, presenting your listener with a perjurious alembic. silence, then. the sort of silence i've snagged on so very many times, whilst on the verge of articulating some infinitely convoluted thought process, and end up shrugging - "no. never mind." truth exists; true representation does not, cannot. and because it has always already begun, because it exists inherently within any act, any experience, any memory thereof - representation has no end.
but we cannot be infinitely silent; indeed, i have more faith in language as a bearer of "meaningful meaning" than that. it's why making connections shake me to my core, why a friend or lover's understanding means so much, why love means even more. it's books that speak my mind; reading derrida, borges, hofstadter, and realizing that i already autonomously shared so much of their perceptions (though in no way their eloquence); music that conveys emotions sans language, formlessly - why these things bring me so much jubilation. it's that in spite of the unutterable futility of representation and the inevitability of meaning-attenuation, in spite of all the insurmountable odds in the way of someone understanding, that someone can, and does. or so we hope, so we need to believe.