Love is not love.

It's still vivid; the first time, I read Sonnet 116.

"Yes! Yes, Shakespeare! This is Love!"

At age 17, with all my knowledge of love, that it is the most wonderful and beautiful feeling on earth, his words were confirmation, to what I believed was love - 'an ever fixed mark'.

5 years later, my view of love hadn't changed much, if at all. Nevertheless, how practical, this description of love can be?

I would prefer stopping by the sonnet, before proceeding:



SONNET 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

What an admirable paradox, Sir William. You've never writ?!

Or had no man ever loved?

True love, being never a subject to alteration, is what he refers to. A love that have deep, mighty roots; a never ending inspiration to the lovers, 'a star to every wandering bark', setting him on track again. He sees true love as that which stands the test of time. Modern science, have had recent evidence that this is possible, despite the previous beliefs, that love fades to time.

Whilst Shakespeare's sonnet embodies true love characteristics, timeless and unaltered, it does not help us learn how to bring these traits into our love stories.

But can it be brought at all? I mean, where is our share in making a love true or not? Why can a human as Shakespeare find love, not a subject to nature's law of change, while the biggest majority of people say, it doesn't last?! Is it luck? Or a real effort to keep the song playing?

Till I can find an answer worth of sharing, I'll just conclude by saying that I absolutely agree that love does not 'bend with the remover to remove'; that even if the spell seems to be broken, the heart would still - by the least - remember, the lover, as a...lover!