Love isn't really a clear or obvious thing. Sure, we may think we feel it when we're in love, but I'm with Stendhal in saying that we are incredibly good at deceiving ourselves in regards to love. When I fell in love the first time, I came at it from a very skeptical place: I knew that I had deceived myself, I knew that I wasn't really in love. I knew that I had just projected all sorts of qualities onto this person because, I suppose, it's what we do. Four years later, when I entered into a relationship with that person, I knew one thing: I was wrong before. I really was in love - er, well, whatever that means. To say that I was ever in love, or was just deceiving myself... well, it oversimplifies the issue to make it so black and white. Rather, I think there is no distinction between crystallization and true, actual love. Maybe I'm taking a bit from Rorty here too, but I would say that love is love, once you call it that... and it's up to you and your partner to really keep that going. Instead of seeing love as some magnificent /thing/ (for it isn't a thing at all), I would suggest that love is instead a way of thinking about somebody - a willingness to see the good in them, to ignore their faults, and certainly, to project qualities unto them which you find yourself to be lacking. I think the pursuit of some sort of "true love" is misleading, because I think it's much more important to find people with whom you can have good times, have deep conversations and share in closeness and intimacy. I think that there is a tendency to /fall/ in love, to lose oneself in the act of idealizing someone beyond who they could ever be... and I'd rather we didn't /fall/ in love, but embraced love with an emotional album, a cup of ice water and a deep hug.

“Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.
Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end.
Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm.
There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay?
Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself.
...
When the mystery of the connection goes, love goes. It's that simple. This suggests that it isn't love that is so important to us but the mystery itself. The love connection may be merely a device to put us in contact with the mystery, and we long for love to last so that the ecstacy of being near the mystery will last. It is contrary to the nature of mystery to stand still. Yet it's always there, somewhere, a world on the other side of the mirror (or the Camel pack), a promise in the next pair of eyes that smile at us. We glimpse it when we stand still.
The romance of new love, the romance of solitude, the romance of objecthood, the romance of ancient pyramids and distant stars are means of making contact with the mystery. When it comes to perpetuating it, however, I got no advice. But I can and will remind you of two of the most important facts I know:
1. Everything is part of it.
2. It's never too late to have a happy childhood.”
--Tom Robbins

~ Alors que le mouvement grossit / il y aura des méandres et des collines / Mais, au centre de la lutte / Sont vos amoureux et vos amis / Plus nous nous soutenons mutuellement / Moins nous pourrions être influencé / À l'amour et la solidarité / Et un baiser derrière les barricades ~

For me, music has always played a deeply emotional role - a feeling isn't ever just a feeling for me, it is also a song, and vice versa. There's nothing more remarkable to me than making music, because there is always an infinite set of information which is condensed into a song - information which only the artist can know, and information which only the listener can know. We each add our own interpretation to music, and in that way, its meaning is created through its interpretation - and somehow we're back to Rorty (but with a hearty helping of Nietzsche). Thus, when an artist makes a song, they can never know how truly important it can be, and what it can truly mean, because that meaning is created in the hearts and minds of the audience.

"That's the most intelligent use of three wishes I ever heard of... You made sure you'd still have something worth wishing for--to get out of the cage."
~ Vonnegut

-- Slavery is murder / Property is theft --
We can thank Proudhon for that one