Vachon Imagined

What humans call love is most often attachment, emotion, memory, and desire.

“I love you because of the way you make me feel.”

“I love you because you are beautiful, kind, intelligent, successful, or loyal.”

There is nothing wrong with this. It is part of being human. But it is important to see it clearly.

These forms of love are conditional. They depend upon qualities, circumstances, memories, and experiences. And everything in the mind changes.

Nothing stays.

Even when you believe you still love someone exactly as you did twenty years ago, what you are often loving is your memory of them. A picture held in the mind. A story preserved through time.

This is why change can feel so threatening.

Parents sometimes struggle when their children develop their own voice, make their own choices, and choose lives different from those imagined for them. The child changes, but the image remains. The conflict is often not between parent and child, but between reality and memory.

The same thing happens in romance.

What humans call love is often obsession wearing the clothes of devotion.

Movies celebrate it. Songs glorify it. We chase the electricity of being consumed by another person, convinced that intensity and love are the same thing.

But anyone who has experienced obsession knows it cannot last forever.

The body cannot sustain that fire indefinitely.

Eventually it returns to earth.

The excitement fades.

The projection fades.

The fantasy fades.

And many people mistake the end of obsession for the end of love.

But obsession is not love.

Attachment is not love.

Possession is not love.

Dependence is not love.

They are experiences that pass through us.

Love remains.

At a certain depth, you no longer love people because of who they are, what they do, what they look like, or what appears on their résumé.

You no longer love them for the feeling they create in you.

You love because you see something deeper than the person.

You see the life within them.

The same life within yourself.

The same life moving through all things.

And in that recognition, love is no longer something you give or receive.

It is something you discover.

Not an emotion.

Not an attachment.

Not a possession.

But the ground beneath every experience.

Bodies change.

Personalities change.

Relationships begin and end.

Memories fade.

Yet love remains.

Not because it belongs to anyone.

But because, beneath every story, every identity, and every experience, it is all there is.