Love and Math

Everyone knows that 1+1=2. Everyone has heard the phrase 2 hearts joined as 1. I have even heard when true love hits, 2+2=5, meaning that something extra is thrown into the package when it's really real. People have a way of putting love, the unexplainable, into terms that are concrete and unchanging, such as numbers. People are added together and eventually multiply to make families. This is what I mean when I talk about love and math.

It's easy to talk about love and math when speaking in terms of addition and multiplication. 1+1=2. Half and half equals a whole. It's all about coming together and creating something new, adding something into the equation that wasn't there before, and the situation becomes better for it. That's what love is.
But what happens when you work in reverse? What happens when you subtract or divide? What happens when love dissipates, or there are breakups or obstacles? In math it's tricky, and in life it's harder. There are remainders and decimals and fractions floating around.

When two people fall in love, it can be considered 1+1=2. But I'm moving to Nashville in two weeks. We aren't breaking up, we're going to suffer the long distance thing, work it out, we're even getting married next year. It's definitely an obstacle. I am still my 1 person, but I feel like I'm less myself without him. How many ways can you divide 2? Am I only 3/4 of me? Does that mean he's the 1 1/4? Or is that extra little piece of me just floating out there somewhere, waiting to be reunited? Maybe it's more of a case of 2+2=5, and we are just losing that extra 1 when the distance tears us apart? Except we aren't. We are just as much in love as we are every day, and it's me personally that feels like I'm losing a part of myself, not a part of love.

This is where my math metaphor falls apart. Love and math is fine and dandy as an addition, joining two people together makes for sweet poetry, but when they reach a hurdle or division, where does the split occur? True love joins people so completely that unlike numbers, they cannot be divided. It becomes impossible to distinguish the self from the other without losing a piece of the puzzle.