Children of Venus

They say true love is unconditional, they also say to truly love is to not expect anything in return, and that to love completely is to let go, let the other free. Are none of us then ever party to a love that's true? To a love that is all encompassing? The love of a parent is said to be the purest of all, the most unconditional. But it too has it's own conditions. Aren't the rules laid down to us to follow from the time comprehension first makes an appearance on the scene, conditions in some ways? Love us, their children, they will. We are after all their flesh, their blood, culmination at times of a love that they hope will last, at others, we still are miniature 'thems'. Tiny pieces of them that we carry around just by being alive. And if love that pure, that untainted is still not devoid of expectations, of rules, of conditions, what hope do we have ever of loving or being loved, in the eyes of the world, ideally?

Questions, questions and more questions that will ultimately lead to doubt that will gnaw at me from within, leave me torn between what I would like, and the picture that reality paints oh so differently.
When I was younger, I thought Grown Ups had all the answers, and when they were answers I didn't like, I consoled myself with the thought that when I was all Grown Up, I would have better answers, solutions to all my problems and the rest of the world's to boot. And now, I find the older I become, the more questions I ask of myself. Questions to which I have no answers, and no hope of finding any either. They are sometimes painful, at others happy discoveries that I make while working around every question that pops up. Unfortunately, nothing as decisive or as conclusive that our science definitions used to be while in school. All are individual choices that I take for my answers to my own questions. Both of which differ drastically from the ones that others around me come up against. How difficult would it have been for whoever made us to give each one of us our life's plan in our heads so that we would just follow it, no questions asked? Ha, wishful thinking never got anyone anywhere. Who am I to even be pondering such questions? Ones that people have been contemplating for too many years to even count now and never came up with one decent answer for.
And so I'm back to love. Who decides when love becomes obsessive? When love becomes more a shackle than the soft touch that one would like to wake up to everyday of their lives? Such pleasure and so much pain all in the name of love....