A good question, Solveig.  But not too many takers.  For my part, I go timid here because I’m a little loath to disparage love.  So refuse to, lessening the chances of prejudicing the inquiry.

So, let’s try to remove its name, that early period you bring to our attention, what we would call the blush of love if not so cautious.  And look only at how this thing is.  Maybe we’ll find no problem at all.

As I see it… no, feel…  I feel it as a Queen.  I’ve just risen from my knee, christened the Quickener of the World.  My glance, now it’s my glance that bestows life.  Decidedly not a Narcotic Queen, My Lady sees over reality.  As her emissary my wardrobe is the colors, the banners of truth.  I feel so alive, so true—to myself, and to the world.

But not only me, along side me my beloved also supplicated to her touch.  Therefore life is quickened in the very activity between us.  It is no longer me who acts, but the newly infallible space that can be said to separate us because light passes through it so easily, but actually joins us in the task.  We are both out of ourselves and I find there is something that is neither my beloved, nor is me, and across the gap a truth that inspires, quickens life in a way familiar but so recently liberated.

And why, I ask, is she a Queen of Youth?  Increasingly she leaves us to our own devices. 

Perhaps a gift from higher gods, our Mythic Queen.  Perhaps her archetypal fields lie in our early years so we can stumble upon what we would do for ourselves, on our own one day.  Perhaps that first love, that first boy or girl, or even the horse that was your first love, a pet, a magical book, the feel of throwing a rock,  perhaps that first love draws her wand through our emotions to freeze a pattern on the surface.  In the day of our love (oops… oh heck, love it is, love it will stay) we discover a pattern, certain swirls and ridges of emotion, a love-pattern otherwise beyond notice, and that is vital for life.

Later, still able to love, or course, we’ve memorized love’s ways, interiorized the quickening process.  Now we are more clear headed about ACTS of love,  taught by then by the emotions of love.  And as we near or pass our half way mark we start to feel, to recognize what happens inside us when we love those subtle states that have no other name but love’s talents for living. 

We have loved in the way of First Love, and have learned to develop love timelessly that way, and meet others at the same love stage.  And recognition is now love.   

I've felt this is an essential question for some time and have been thinking about how to articulate a response. I certainly don't have an answer, yet, but perhaps it is worth thinking out loud here.

Ted articulates some of the loveliness of love, how it might evolve and submerge and be re-invented; but I think Solveig's question gets to something even more basic, a certain failure of imagination on the part of our society. Love is really the quintessential experience as far as creativity is concerned, as far as encounter with another is concerned. Religion is painted with the brush of erotic love, coyly of course; friendship is imagined as a sort of cerebral version of it; most movies with any emotional content are love stories. It seems that the emotionally intelligent person interested in deepening their human experience is encouraged to explore the boundaries of relation in the realm of love, and really in that realm only. And within the realm of love, the erotic (as opposed to the quality of friendship, or filial love, or love of mentors or of one's community or country or vocation) is privileged above all others.

So life stories, as we are told them, take on a certain kind of spiral quality, in which the touchstone is always a return to love, to that same newness and re-creation which the erotic brings to life.

Without negating its effect, I am suspicious of such circumscribed stories...

Surely there are deep realms of experience waiting to be woven into our collective storytelling? What determines whether something becomes a collective rite of passage, a feeling which is part of the cultural memory, or something seen as satisfying only to a chosen few? What do we consider the essential human experiences? How do we cultivate them?

Mia, a very ambitious line of speculation.  Perhaps THE most fundamental thing about us is our existential isolation as individuals.  We value the repair.  Whether love, friendship, art, play… all things that bring us closer to another or closer to a real or imagined essential nature.

Even perception—can it be thought of in the same way, effecting a union?

Perhaps it’s not a case of being told those stories.  It seems a structural problem. 

On the societal level, where I believe you want to limit your question, connectivity (which love is) can find different modulations, I would think.  The dominance of narrative certainly poses restrictions—the option of self-revelation and relation beyond narrativity faces subtle discouragement. 

However, in fully accepting the question, that there are indeed other, less used, or yet discovered ways to fashion a psyche, maybe we can in fact go about changing ourselves fundamentally as a species.  Originating in social practice, in the ways we relate to one another, effecting new atomic psyches, in turn effecting our fundamental, collective make up.  Even give us altered fundamentals.

I guess I would answer for myself by just accepting our emotional lives on their own, including the hollow feeling inside that can come and go, become shaded, tinted, hued according to the weather, but never leave our side—and accept that love lies in and can not do without the breach.  And, that not all rites of passage are arbitrarily social constructs, and that social construction has its wisdom that is beyond reason.

It does seem liberating though, personally, the idea that I no longer must base my thinking, or even my love around alienation.  I’ll see where the idea takes me.  Thanks.