It's an extraordinary thing to find someone you can bare your soul to - someone who will then accept you for who you are...yet, it's a strangely common thing called love. The number one theme of all music, movies and poetry...we love to love...even though it often brings us our greatest heartaches, it is what we are looking for...in kindergarten, in college and even in greeting card aisles. Even though we do not understand it, we constantly seek it - like a high, like a saviour, like grace...
For, what else makes our hearts quicken and pound?
What else could render us so intensely alive with desire?
Have you ever known anything else that could make you ache like a lost soul on a dark night?
So insistent and powerful, we rarely notice when struck by love that it can obliterate all reason. It may just be the first time in our lives where reason is no longer captain of our ship... We are happy; we are relieved and we may suddenly be tempted to take refuge from a world that otherwise does not make sense...love holds such profound promise that we will swear to it until the day we die.
fuck. Shakespeare was right.
Unfortunately, love, once found, does not always provide the miracles we expect it to perform. After all, we are still imperfect human beings.. random beginners... stuck within our own uncomprehending humanity, partaking in the tomfoolery of such things as Valentine's Day..
I have been disappointed in love many times in my life, just like everyone else. But some memories stand out more than others. A few years ago, I had my heart shattered when someone I loved very much walked away at a time when I desperately needed his support. If you had been watching, you would have witnessed a heart ripped out of its chest, thrown on the ground and stomped repeatedly until nothing but an angry, defiled Jackson Pollock remained.. a screaming, painful reminder of a love that existed once... at least that's what it was like for me.
We think, if only we found the right one, then everything would make sense; our addictions would cease to possess our souls and our life purpose would become clear. With love we believe we will be honorable, honest and true... we even dare to believe that life will be simple and less complicated even when the evidence that ceaselessly surrounds us points to the contrary.
One of my dearest friends recently broke up with his long time girlfriend of two years because he fell in love with someone else; someone he felt understood him better and wouldn't force him to compromise his passion and life-calling for the stage in order to find "security" on bended knee with a regular job, a mortgage and three kids not far off... it was the right decision. He sought love and commitment, but not of this sort. Ironically, two months into this new, ideal love, his now girlfriend had the opposite reaction and said she wasn't ready for the kind of commitment he was looking for and broke it off. You see it wasn't that he didn't want commitment, he just didn't believe it should come at the expense of being true to himself. I guess the same was true for her.
At the end of Annie Hall, Woody Allen is wandering through the streets asking strangers how they found happiness in love...none of the answers make any sense. They aren't supposed to. Love is one of the strangest, elusive and nebulous emotions we, as humans, can feel; yet, it can possess our souls and willfully charge change. Love can make people marry, suddenly want children and drive us to make great sacrifices and life changes to be with the one for whom we have fallen. If there were no great love stories, there would be no great movies...but, what happens when our real lives don't actually fall in line with the great Hollywood love stories? What happens when our real lives make us say things like, "damn the movies"?
Too often, in real life, love doesn't matter. In life we have bosses and careers, we have children and responsibilities, we have deadlines and bills that force our hand in the choices we make...reason works it's way back and takes over the course of our ship. Somewhere along the course of our relationships we forget that love is an everyday thing...love begins to fade.
It begs the question, how is a relationship only based on love supposed to survive the bad times?
When it comes to love we don't always see things the same way. The intensity with which love enters our lives dims, which is why we have, over the ages, created commitment. The binding force that keeps us in check with a love we once promised. It is the commitment that reminds us why we are here. It is the commitment that makes love an every day thing in our lives.. however, unlike love, commitment is far more based on values than emotion. We may fall in love with someone because they are beautiful, honest and true and yet find ourselves unable to commit when we discover that the sound of traffic makes one of us sleep like a baby and keeps the other one up all night long.
We fall in love with a person and eventually we commit to a life with that person if we think it's right. What makes it right are similar value systems, passions and shared life visions. This is what we don't talk about with each other when we are young and in love because we don't fully realize what love really means... and it is what we fully come to realize all to well the older we get when things aren't working, whether we find ourselves in an unhappy marriage or repeatedly single. At some point love becomes an every day thing and happily ever after means nothing if one of you wants a house on the hills and the other wants a hut in Phuket.
When we are young we can say "I love you" much more easily because we have yet to fully understand the meaning of love as a commitment. Love as an every day thing doesn't yet exist. When we are older, it becomes more difficult because we know that commitment is the biggest part of love. It commits us to another person for sure, but also to ourselves as someone who has chosen to love and support and believe in another. That's the part that starts to scare us. We know we can find love again, but commitment is much harder to lose. Losing the "everydayness" of being with someone devastates like napalm. As Woody Allen would say, when love is gone, it's the eggs we miss most, not the chicken.
If love is the chicken, then it's the eggs that make it real in our lives; makes it present in every day life. When we cook dinner together, walk the dog, make love or do the laundry...these are the eggs we miss and even though we can find other chickens, the eggs will never be the same and as twisted as they have become, at least they accepted you for who you were, which is where it all began in the first place... a thing that because in some time, in some place, under some star and because of some really good friend, there was a thing called love..
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