I was having a conversation today with a close friend that touched on the nature of love. The question we were discussing boiled down to the following: When you love somebody, who is it exactly that you love?
After all, we all know that everybody changes over time. Not only do we each change our perspective as we get older, but we also have new life experiences that can deeply affect our view of reality itself, as well as our view of other people.
So to say simply that you love somebody is actually, truth be told, merely shorthand for something much more complex. I tried to convey this idea to my friend.
“To love a person,” I told her, “is to love a journey.” We agreed that this sounded about right.