Immense, Not Infinite, Love

I love you this much. 

How much? 

This much! 

I have some pretty big loves in my life. I love them immensely. I think about them most of my day. But it is an odd thing to try to quantify love. When I was younger, I was convinced that loving one more person didn't mean you loved the others less, but it does, in fact. Olivia came along and Dan used to say that he felt like he was getting a smaller "piece of the pie" so to speak. And I would get annoyed with him for suggesting that I only had so much love to give and not enough of it was going his way. But I get it now.

From the perspective of the person loving, the love feels infinite because it is everything we have, but from the perspective of the person being loved it's pretty easy to see the deficiencies. As it turns out, I can't really think about all of the people that I love all of the time. So, what happens?

I had a professor who once said, "You fall in love with the people around you." In my experience that's often true, but the same rule applies to love in general. The people closest to you, either physically or mentally, are the ones that get more of your love. And, in sort of the same way that one language is always dominant at any given time, the love never disappears, but it is more or less strong depending on who's closest.

Writing this makes me wonder if our finite mind power is why the heart was chosen as a symbol of love. But I digress. The entire point of this blog entry, aside from pretending that people want to read what I have to say, was to assure Dan that there is hope, because SOMEDAY our children will leave the house. And, if we have to, we can move far far away from them so that you can have the bigger piece of pie for once!