I ran into Khevna again this morning, on the train at Wilson Station this time, and she gave me the magazine. One of the pages displayed the word LOVE in big, bold letters, which got me interested since I presume that the thought of love makes everyone, like me, happy.

But not any kind of love. There’s a specific type of love that gets everyone giggly.

After class today, Amy Tang and I saw a cheesy movie called ‘What’s Your Number,’ which is about one woman’s quest to finding ‘the one’ (as is the running theme all chick flicks) as she goes through all 20 of her ex’s to see if any of them were worth a second chance, only to realize in the end that the guy who was helping her the entire time was ‘the one.’

Side note: anyone else notice how amazingly boring and predictable recent chick flicks have become? My theory is that it’s because it’s based on the romantic ideals of extreme situations that could happen. For example, in the movie, the girl has slept with 20 other guys in her life, before finding ‘the one,’ and the guy has presumably slept with just as many different girls (if not more). This is so extreme that it’s become unromantic, stale, and frankly, kind of depressing, even if they end up together.

Anyway, my point is, everyone, even in predictable chick flicks, is looking for ‘the one,’ a.k.a romantic type love. The magazine Khevna gave me featured an article called ‘500 days of disappointment’ which is a journal in which an unnamed girl wrote in for 500 days that mostly details about her desire for unconditional love. She looks for this love in relationships with guys, only to constantly come out feeling short handed, as if something was missing. There’s always that horrible, cheated, lonely feeling that can’t be made sense of, that sense of dread that you won’t be able to fill in this gap. If this guy can’t make you happy, then what will? Isn’t love supposed to the ultimate source of happiness?

The conclusion here is a happy one. She writes:

“I come to the conclusion that if I have this craving, there are two possibilities: this love – a love sans conditions - actually exists and can be found, or this love doesn’t exist and I’ve all deluded myself into thinking it does … I realize that I am wired to want and desire a kind of love that exists, but that I haven’t found. But if this is the way I am wired, then maybe, there is an outlet to experience this love and to output this love as well. I just need to find it … But if all the love that we have experienced has been finite, then this love probably can’t come from other humans.

Maybe, then, I’ve been seeing love the wrong way. Because if love has limits, if love is finite, if love has conditions, it may not be love. But if love is unconditional, unmerited and undeserved, then maybe religions version of love – as in, a set of rules and decrees to be followed, in order to satiate the wrath of a particular deity – has it all wrong. Maybe I don’t need to toil and labour and travail in order to be loved. It seems to me that if there is an infinite God, He has wired me so that, in search of this infinite love, I turn to Him, connect with Him and experience relationship rather than religion."

So if God’s love is the infinite love everyone is looking for, then to love others we must show them God’s infinite love.

(But I've recently realize this is easier said and done. Maybe more on this later.)