Advice, part 7: Love

But now faith, hope, and love remain-these three. The greatest of these is love. - 1 Corinthians 13:13

Love
There are so many different quotes about love out there, and most of them are basically cliche, adopted already by any of a hundred thousand cutie college coeds for use on their flashy, cutesy website.

But love is not something that should be summed up in one cutesy quote - sometimes it takes three:

Love is a many splendid thing.
Love lifts us up where we belong.
All you need is love!
~ Moulin Rouge

Love isn't something that can be summed up in any sort of quote or cliche or movie line; it's simply too much and too important for that.

If you have it [Love], you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have.
~ Sir James M. Barrie

But we struggle so much with attempting to define it and nail it down so that we can say just why we love who we love. So that we can help our friends to find the happiness and joy that we have in it, we search for the right words to do love the honor and justice that we feel that it deserves.

Love doesn't make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
~ Franklin P. Jones

But our words cannot do love justice. Love is too big, too wonderful, too much for us to do anything more than hint at its true essence. To capture even a snapshot of love is to do it a desservice by leaving out every other aspect of its being.

He loves but little who can say and count in words, how much he loves.
~ Dante Alighieri

Love is more many-faceted than a d30. Love is the most wonderful thing in the world, bringing us to greater heights and happinesses than we will ever experience otherwise, and love is the most hurtful thing possible - taking everything that we believed in and allowing it to be broken and twisted and hurt in ways we never thought imaginable. Love is laughter and tears, friendship and anger, calm and exciting.

Love is like pi -- natural, irrational, and very important.
~ Lisa Hoffman

And love is nothing that anyone can ever tell you about. No two loves are ever the same, because love is a combination of two people, each depending on and needing the other, and at times, each subsuming their individuality to the greater good of the combination. No matter how I or you or anyone attempts to describe their love, their lover, their joy to anyone else, the words are but a pale shadow of the truth.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.
~ Helen Keller

We are no more able to touch and grasp love, to hold it in our hands, to disects its being and number its parts than we are to hold onto the air, to freedom, to sunshine, to joy. Love is the ultimate failing of science because no matter how long we number the carbons and analyze the chemicals of our brains and our pelvises, we engage in the ultimate act of reductionist thinking, believing that we can put love to a board, pin its wings open, and allow every other member of the lab to coldly explore our finidings.

Love is a rose
but you better not pick it
It only grows when it's on the vine.
A handful of thorns and
you'll know you've missed it
You lose your love
when you say the word "mine".
~ Neil Young, "Love is a Rose"

This week's advice, then, is the simplest of all and the most impossible to give:

Love
Allow yourself it be open to love wherever you happen to find it.

Take care of love once you have it.

Do not take love for granted for their is nothing more important than it.

And cherish it with all your heart, soul, mind, body, money, and time - for there is nothing more important than it and nothing that is so horrible to waste or lose.

And remember to wish your wife a happy birthday as many times and in as many ways as you can manage. Happy birthday, cutie pie.