I feel as though youth mixed with love is a dangerous combination, obviously not in the sense that I have anything against it. I don't think I have ever experienced young love... but the problem is, youth is precisely that which knows itself as young, it knows that it is a time to experiment, that it is allowed to make mistakes, that to learn is to make mistakes. The youth is remarkably self-aware, it does not understand stupidity, because it thinks of everything as a 'learning experience'. Love, on the other hand, always tends towards a heaviness. Love is not light, whatever people pretend about it -- it always asks for nothing but takes everything. The essence of love is an unbearable responsibility, even in the lightest things. I feel as though people who haven't experienced this have merely been in a relationship. In this sense, I feel as though love and youth are opposites. What can be the result of this? The end of one or the complete misunderstanding of the other?
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Young love is the paradox of a full committment to an idea that is not understood. It is a blind faith that says giving all is good for its own sake and yet provides immediate satisfaction and return on investment.
@herzog3000 - I think what's so attractive about love, for the youth, is that it is as light as youth claims to be -- love is free, it is based on sensual pleasure (which is readily available), it is happiness, motivation, higher purpose, and everything else for free. Indeed, it's immediate satisfaction and something for nothing, "a return on an investment". When someone is in love, they ask -- why shouldn't the world be healed in this way? The entire "commitment", as you call it, is too easy, and it gives the impression of sacrifice (of giving) without really having sacrificd anything.
I would say it's a kind of guilty pleasure that seems to give too much, seems to be too easy, and seems a ready solution to all of the world's problems. But eventually, we find out that something else lurks there (especially in heartbreak), and what seems to be the darker 'essence' of love seems to come forth. I'm probably going to spend the next few days on this...