I think that the
title itself tells about everything. Just think about your
family: Your
mother might be an old
witch, always complaining about a thing or another (but cooked food though) and
father played only
supporting role when it came into
domestic issues and all he did was to drive you to the gates of a
football club for the
first time. And you fellow
siblings you used to have fights with...
In the final analysis these bad things count nothing. In the end you will say you love them.
Of course, it's not only a family business. The kid from the next door you used to go to school with and play your childish games -- it's something you don't easily forget.
Remembering myself, I haven't seen the best friend of my childhood for a couple of years but I still care about him and I'm keen to know how he's doing.
And what about your first so called love.. I'm pretty sure that I'll remember her in my rocking chair in a nursing home. That is, we were wee kiddies, like 12ish, and it was more like being just good friends and pre-teen admiration, if you know what kind of level of "love" I mean here..
In a highschool I used to have almost permanent hard-on (like every other testosterone-filled (post-)teen lad) and I used to fancy many girlies but I hardly can nowadays count them as love. I never really got to know these ladies (merely because I was a sucker suffering from angst and apathy i.e. typical representative of generation X) and it takes a very painful effort to try to memorize even the names of those lassies.
Well, it may be also my introvert character, but when I make friends I don't tend to make huge piles of them. I enjoy more a company of the people I know well. When it comes to some particular person; even when I find some not quite nasty but that kind of traits I don't really wish anyone to have, I use to tolerate them (of course there must be a certain threshold but I hardly meet suckers who have come across that line) and, I would say, I add those traits in my book of interesting varities of life to increase my experience of life.
Oh, eventually the main point.
You find a person you fancy. I'll say it's just an admiration or being charmed by appearence or by some smart line of that object of your 'what you think is' love. The old wisdom of "love at the first sight" is never true. More you know about a person, more you are really likely to love her. Love is not something you by from a supermarket in the nice box but it's just a seed embodied in human sort of existence and it needs to be cultivated.
Break Think about a cactus you have cultivated in order to eat it and have a hallugenious trip. It takes 6 years of your motherly care to have a full-blown plant. In the end you find it very difficult to eat it, it your child. You'll have a trip caused by the idea what you're doing. You'll trip-hop to higher level you'd never managed to do if you just went out and bought a forage from a dealer. /break
Think about a prostitute and platonic love. The latter is definitely love but the former.. hardly. The very nicest thing in this is that capitalism never will intervene when it comes to love. Love is one of few unrecuperable things there is.
Btw, the title is a chorus of the Smashing Pumpkins song Love from the album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.