Love. Love is many things. Love is multifaceted and can be uniquely defined by each individual experiencing or yearning this whirlwind of emotion and feeling. Those who know me, know that I have relationship issues. These issues are in conjunction with love but not to be confused with love or the idea of it. Today I realized how special love actually is.
I’ve always had a jaded sense of love. I guess because I over analyze things and there’s not a clear cut answer about love- not because I grew up with a lack of it or experienced it in a perverted way or anything like that. I have a lot of love in my life and sometimes I take it for granted. I can be a lot of things but nice sometimes most times, well, that’s all debatable but that’s not my point. Point being, that no matter my dislike and/or bratty attitude I still love those that I loathe. This got put in perspective for me today in a big way. Love isn’t perfect and though people fuss and fight it doesn’t mean that they don’t love one another.
I remember love at different stages in my life. When I was in high school I used love as an argument. I would ask my teacher to define love, being that this was a Religion class he could reference Biblically for days. I didn’t care to hear the answer. I used this as a ploy to buy me time to do other homework or study for tests that I had later in the day. I also manipulated the idea of love to get my way, “If you love me you’ll...” This worked on my parents and boyfriends for a long time (maybe that’s why I’m the brat that I am today.) I also remember working close to a cafeteria and every Sunday after church I would watch the little old men and women go to lunch. Observing these elderly couples was one of the sweetest things that I’ve ever witnessed. The men would walk around the car and open the passenger door, offer a hand getting in and out of the car and offer another hand when stepping on or off of the sidewalk, they opened doors and kissed the cheeks of their significant others. As I got older, I began to notice other patterns of love. The changing of relationships and love not being what you thought it would be and learning the difference between infatuation, lust and love...getting your heart broken and learning how to overcome that and try it again.
In a world where there are more broken homes than there are successful marriages, it is easy for love to be cheapened, forgotten and taken for granted. This is ironic to me because no matter how lost or hopeless, people still yearn to find and to experience love. My parents have been married a long time but my grandparents have been married even longer, almost 70 years! Today, at the hospital, the nurses were inquiring about how long my grandparents have been married. They commented on how they could tell how much my grandfather loved and cared for his wife. At that moment, I realized that my grandparents are those people that I used to watch every Sunday at work, my parents probably will be those people and one day, I want to be those people too. I am 26 and not married and that is because I am waiting for my person who I can be those people with one day.
And btw, this is why people fell in love with The Notebook! ;)
