On Love
This is something Tad and I talked about this morning, and nothing other people haven’t thought about and talked about before.
I have friends who say they are in love. Not just that they love each other, and not just that they’re “in love” with little hearts and flowers drawn around it. They talk about being in love with their spouse or their fiance/e and knowing that that person is the one they were meant to be with for the rest of their lives. And being glad to be with one person for the rest of their lives. Real, real love.
I’ve never had that feeling before.
It’s not that I’m jealous of these friends – I’m not. I’m happy for them.
But sometimes I think they must be lying. Or, at least, exaggerating quite a bit. (Or maybe even just misled by really good sex.)
I want to believe it’s true – that there is such a thing as true love. I want to believe it because I want my friends’ happy lives to last forever.
And, if it is true, I wonder if it will ever happen to me. I can’t help but think about how nice life would be if it did happen to me.
I think that a lot of people covet that feeling. Or think that they’re supposed to be experiencing it, whether they are or not. I think there are two sad ways to react to it. You can either lie/exaggerate to yourself about a relationship you’re in and make it permanent, hoping it’ll eventually really be true love. (Even though you’ll end up miserable.) Or, you can avoid forming relationships at all, unless you’re absolutely sure up front that it’s going to be true love forever. (Even though there is no such guarantee, so you’ll just end up alone.)
Tad and I are very alike in our cynicism and hope. But, together, we have grown and matured. I think we’ve learned that there are better ways to live than those listed in the paragraph above.
I hope there is such a thing as true love, for my friends’ sake. If there is such a thing, I think it would be nice to find it for myself.
But if I don’t find it, that’s okay, too. I’m still going to work to make the best life possible for myself. I don’t want to make my life into a quest for romance. I have plenty of good things going on without throwing it all away on that.
I think if there is such a thing as true love, it might be like finding a twenty-dollar bill on the street. You don’t want to spend your life scouring the ground for money, do you? But, at the same time, there’s nothing wrong with keeping your eyes open.
Or, at least, that’s how I feel about life today.
