[01.03] - Love, Despite
Nothing has prepared me for the complexities of adult love. Not childish wedding fantasies, not formulaic romance novels, and surely not the annual parade of neat gift-giving days.
Mother’s Day for mothers. Father’s Day—well, that’s mostly for buying roadside crabs, but sure, if you know who your daddy (or baby’s daddy) is and he actually features in your life, it’s for pops. Valentine’s, of course, is for lovers.
How lucky that society has established days to tell us how, when, and who to love. Perish the thought that we might have sufficient brain power to figure out appropriate times to express our appreciation for those we hold close and high.
Calendar celebrations of love unsettle me.
It’s not just that they epitomise the wasteful and pointless material crap that characterizes our lifestyles: wrapping paper, designed to be torn off and thrown away; red paper hearts put up this week and tossed out next; mass produced greeting cards spouting sappy sentiments you could better say yourself.
It’s that they promote idealized portrayals of love, and that’s not right.
Love, in our society, implies certain things. You eat, go out together and participate in various activities, from co-movie-watching to sundry levels of carnal joy. It implies an ever after, the fuzzy sensation acquired at the end of romantic comedies, the last scene from a fairy tale—the Disney version, that is.
In reality, love’s often closer to Hans Christian Anderson stories, where characters freeze to death while they fantasize contentment and the girl ends as foam on the beach and not as a princess in the hero’s arms. Extreme? Probably. Imperfect? Indeed. Love’s often like that.
As a semi-romantic, I enjoy the Bible’s love chapter: love is patient, love is kind. Its ideals are enticing and sweet, they sum up what many hope to find. Even there, though, a closer look reveals that it’s much more about endurance, suffering, and continuing despite.
Love frequently stinks. It can involve extreme attachment even though someone can’t and won’t stay in your life, intense admiration for someone you’ll never have. It can involve physical distance, emotional distance, distance due to sickness, distance due to duty and devotion to others you may love less but have committed to and, thus, must protect.
To make ourselves feel better, we tell ourselves and each other lies that downgrade the significance of our bitter ventures. “I was just obsessed with him.” “I was only dependant on her.” “It wasn’t really love.” Creating these compartments makes it much easier to distance misfortunes from amore that falls closer to the happy ideal.
I love to see old couples tottering down the street, side by side, arm in arm, propping each other up and moving each other along. I like to imagine all those years together, the children they’ve raised, meals they’ve shared, the home they’ve loved and lived in.
In reality, the children probably include a few fruits of infidelity. Some of those meals were likely seasoned with spite or burned intentionally. The house walls may be dented from where someone aimed a skillet at somebody’s head.
Unless they are reincarnated saints, they’re together in spite of, not because of.
If anything, acknowledging the bitter makes human attachment well-rounded, real and remarkable. Anyone can love surrounded by red satin and white chiffon (with a garland of chubby-legged teddy bears dancing around).
It takes true substance and real heart to persist with love when it’s more like a rabid grizzly tearing at your leg, when it’s more about holding on, despite.
And yet, we do. I think we should celebrate that.
- ja**ly
Mother’s Day for mothers. Father’s Day—well, that’s mostly for buying roadside crabs, but sure, if you know who your daddy (or baby’s daddy) is and he actually features in your life, it’s for pops. Valentine’s, of course, is for lovers.
How lucky that society has established days to tell us how, when, and who to love. Perish the thought that we might have sufficient brain power to figure out appropriate times to express our appreciation for those we hold close and high.
Calendar celebrations of love unsettle me.
It’s not just that they epitomise the wasteful and pointless material crap that characterizes our lifestyles: wrapping paper, designed to be torn off and thrown away; red paper hearts put up this week and tossed out next; mass produced greeting cards spouting sappy sentiments you could better say yourself.
It’s that they promote idealized portrayals of love, and that’s not right.
Love, in our society, implies certain things. You eat, go out together and participate in various activities, from co-movie-watching to sundry levels of carnal joy. It implies an ever after, the fuzzy sensation acquired at the end of romantic comedies, the last scene from a fairy tale—the Disney version, that is.
In reality, love’s often closer to Hans Christian Anderson stories, where characters freeze to death while they fantasize contentment and the girl ends as foam on the beach and not as a princess in the hero’s arms. Extreme? Probably. Imperfect? Indeed. Love’s often like that.
As a semi-romantic, I enjoy the Bible’s love chapter: love is patient, love is kind. Its ideals are enticing and sweet, they sum up what many hope to find. Even there, though, a closer look reveals that it’s much more about endurance, suffering, and continuing despite.
Love frequently stinks. It can involve extreme attachment even though someone can’t and won’t stay in your life, intense admiration for someone you’ll never have. It can involve physical distance, emotional distance, distance due to sickness, distance due to duty and devotion to others you may love less but have committed to and, thus, must protect.
To make ourselves feel better, we tell ourselves and each other lies that downgrade the significance of our bitter ventures. “I was just obsessed with him.” “I was only dependant on her.” “It wasn’t really love.” Creating these compartments makes it much easier to distance misfortunes from amore that falls closer to the happy ideal.
I love to see old couples tottering down the street, side by side, arm in arm, propping each other up and moving each other along. I like to imagine all those years together, the children they’ve raised, meals they’ve shared, the home they’ve loved and lived in.
In reality, the children probably include a few fruits of infidelity. Some of those meals were likely seasoned with spite or burned intentionally. The house walls may be dented from where someone aimed a skillet at somebody’s head.
Unless they are reincarnated saints, they’re together in spite of, not because of.
If anything, acknowledging the bitter makes human attachment well-rounded, real and remarkable. Anyone can love surrounded by red satin and white chiffon (with a garland of chubby-legged teddy bears dancing around).
It takes true substance and real heart to persist with love when it’s more like a rabid grizzly tearing at your leg, when it’s more about holding on, despite.
And yet, we do. I think we should celebrate that.
- ja**ly
Labels: Bahamas, conditioning, life lessons, Nassau, New Providence, spite, Valentines
Posted by ja**ly @ 3:00 AM
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