They say that loving is hard, but I think that being loved is only the harder. To love someone, or to be in love with someone, is fundamentally a selfish act. All the joy to be found in touching his hand, in feeling his cold cheek against yours, is yours and only yours. There are those moments, side by side, the clinking of silverware against plates, the shuffle of feet and a hand in yours, the glow of the moon that lights a shadow that flares up in an instant and extinguishes again, with only its imprint in your memory. It only takes a moment to fall in love, because it is a gripping obsession, an infatuation that clings to all inside of you that yearned to be sated, and fills those gaps with something new, something for your mind to race upon. It's true, to be in love with someone takes days, weeks, months, what have you may, but to fall in love with the very essence of someone, no, that takes but a moment. After all, all that there is to be known of a person can be observed with the most acute eye within a span of a few minutes; that is, all that is to be known about the chemistry, the dynamic, the interflow, between that someone and you.

But then, to be loved, that is a different matter. With love comes responsibility, guilt, trust, duty (akin to responsibility but occasionally tied to resentment), obligation, even. There is no choice in being loved, there is only acknowledgment, and that, that is little. To be loved and loved well is a condition that requires the utmost grace. There are no niceties to be casually rehearsed, there is only the knowing. That is to say, the knowing that you are loved. With this knowing, you are compelled to act decently, with consideration. The knowing isn't like being in love, for it isn't a thought that skitters through your everyday interactions with intermittent reprieves. It is a constant feeling, one that becomes a part of your thinking and therein begins to control your every doing. And that, that can be tiring. Never tiresome, but exacting. Once fallen into error, love becomes smeared with the stink of obligation, and after, we can only wait for it to ebb, recede, come stronger, then finally fall back, until we long once again to be loved as we once were.