Lovely scented lies.

The rampant obsession of every college student these days is, dare I say it, love. Friends visit, friends ask, friends wonder, friends call, with but one aim: to discover love. What is love? they ask. I don't think anyone is all that eager to find it; only they wish to know it when they see it. Or rather, perhaps they search its shape like a soldier his enemy; to know it even by sillouette or shadow, they think, will make them safe.

We are irrationally afraid of love. Admit it. You'd far rather know a person hates you than have to wonder and postulate about their love. It's not sure; it's risky; it hurts when you're wrong. Every time I come near to love, I recoil; I run. Love is far too fickle to be trusted; therefore it must be avoided at all costs. Now there are obviously different forms of love, each to be treated as distinct. One need not run from agape, or "charity" as the British call it. Agape is wholesale, impersonal, unconditional, safe. Storge is generally safe too: the sort of love your grandparents have for you, or that friend you've known twenty-three years; it's a faithful, aged love; just like we do not doubt the integrity of a castle that has stood for a millenia, so we do not doubt a love of decades.

As children, these two loves are all we experience; agape from the church and teachers, storge from our parents and surrogate aunts. As children, we trust love. We venture into the world, eyes wondering, arms outstretched and are promptly slapped. Stunned, we run to our parents, to the safe people we know, who hug us and hold us and tell us, "It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." We are to give it another chance, they tell us; we're still young. And so we are slapped again and again, every time told to give it another shot. "Better to have loved..." We grow to hate the word for the pain it connotates. We remember the days before we risked love out there and consider returning to the safe loves we've known. Too late though; the damage is permanent: we realize upon returning that we can no longer trust the safe loves: we realize it is they who have sent us again and again to this intolerable pain. We are alienated and isolated; we withdraw into ourselves and will to never love or be loved again.

In our pain all distinctions of love are rain-streaked windows. We forget the difference of agape and storge from the dangerous loves; phileo and eros. Phileo is friendly, "brotherly" love. It is the love between mere friends and companions. It is not the love of bosom friends; that is aged; that is storge. Phileo is dangerous because it is poignant and yet it is the love we least expect to be recinded. When it is broken we are perhaps more shocked than with eros, as we know eros is a risk; phileo we believe we can trust. Eros is romantic and erotic love. It is the love that develops between lovers as they experience each others' bodies and idiosyncrasies. It is not lust. It is the most dangerous of the loves because it demands us to completely sacrifice for the benefit of our lover. This love corrupted produces stalkers and evil ex-lovers. As Vanilla Sky reminds us, "Your body makes a promise." To break the promise is a deathblow.

Now, as children we are accustomed to agape and storge; as adventurers we are slapped by phileo and eros. It begins in grammar school when our "best friend" plays kickball instead of joining us on the monkey bars. And then again when the neighbor can't play baseball; some "girl is coming over." As we begin to discover the joys of gender we begin to experiment. Notes passed, friends as liasons, "Do you like me too?", kisses behind bushes with our friends watching, and then the inevitable, "I think we need to break up." We are crushed. We made a promise. They promised us. They lied.

As we lose our trust in the dangerous loves, as a result of pain after pain, we grow insecure with any vestige of them. With all our hearts we want to believe they like us, maybe even love us, but our reason refuses to admit that they might. And when the girl smiles or the boy drops by we laugh it off, "Oh it's nothing serious," and count the days till they hurt us. During the encounters, we brace ourselves with shields and armor -- a brilliant smile, a witicism, an insult "You're so dumb!" to say, "Don't get too close, I might just have meant that," a cold shoulder once in a while, a "deep" conversation to test the waters, anything really, except for us, the real us. And so perhaps they do fall in love, they do find phileo and eros in our company. Inevitably though, the facade must crumble and the real us be discovered. And the real us is not who they found love with, so they leave. We are crushed again. We resolve to rebuild the facade, and stronger this time. We are lost in our illusions. We decide no one knows us, nor could possibly love us, and so we withdraw and hide amongst our fears, and resolve never to be had again.

Too often we get our wish. We are never had again. We are never loved again. We are hermits beside Walden, wondering why we risked love, wondering what love is, and what it was when we had it, and wondering why we cannot find it again. And so we fall in love with ourselves, or with nature, and worship some ideal of what love could be. And there, in our hermitages, alone and unloved, we die.