it is looking for love, in all the wrong places

I've been listening to the radio a lot lately. Not sure why, the car I am presently driving has a CD player and I have stocked it chock full of Cold Play, Ingrid, Mumford, Imogen, Tim McGraw and the like yet for some reason I've been listening to the DJ's actually paying attention to Usher lyrics and singing along to Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros. These last few weeks I've been on a path of self-discovery. Actually this can be said of my entire year however this past month has felt different. I am struggling with selfishness, forgiveness and forgetting somethings and remembering others. One of the things I am learning about the world is how exactly it views love. During the whole mess with Adam and I, the most painfully obvious bit was that he didn't value, want or maybe appreciate is the right word, my love. As I've been listening to the songs climbing the charts I'm realizing that the world views love differently than I. They use the word to often, too quickly and not with the weight my love actually means. As Usher is pumping out DJ's got us falling in love, I'm thinking of what type of love that is. It most assuredly isn't deep passionate 'til death love. One of my favorite movies is Paris Je t'aime (don't bother with the sequel New York I Love you, it's not worth it). The film consists of several shorts each telling a story of a kind of love, in the city of love. They express love in tolerance, acceptance, trust, passion, family, loss, infatuation. There is a reason each of these words exist but as the DJ's play song after song about one night stands, summer flings, winter rendezvous and passionate affairs all the song lyricists use the same word, L-O-V-E. (Before you go off and say, this is just the age we live in, people just don't know what it is to love anymore, I remember the good old days, stop. These songs and these ideas of shallow love have existed since the beginning of time.) I know I am not alone in the world, viewing love the way I do. I know there are men and women out there who believe that love is more than a psychical attraction, more than a chemical reaction and lasts longer than a day, a month, or a year. I think that is one of the issues I am fighting with myself on right now. I don't want Adam anymore, mainly because he has made it painfully clear he doesn't want me. But how do you stop loving someone? And does that make me a fool either way? If I stop loving him what does that make my love? Fickle, fair weather? But he doesn't love or want me so doesn't that make me a bigger fool to still love him? It is coming on a new year. Last year this time I made a resolution to not live in regrets. To take risks, to take chances, to live. And I have. I have done a lot of that. It was good. It was hard. It has been worth it. Now this coming year I will resolve to learn to let go, and then most important of all how to forgive myself for doing so.