finally!!! (at 3 Palms Oceanfront Hotel)
Love, you say.
What do I think about love? I think love is a beautiful thing. Better yet, it has the power to be a beautiful thing. But I think we demonize it too much, now. We still make songs about it, search for it endlessly, watch movies about it. It’s all kind of just ‘there’ as this incredible, illustrious thing that the few and far between manage to find. And as “rare” as it is, we all seem to believe that we will be that lucky person in the strange masses of humanity to find it.
I think we’ve created such a strange infatuation with love in the modern world that we’ve entirely lost sight of the possibilities it can offer. We’re afraid of it, in short. We’re afraid to feel all of those crazy, high, enlightened, sickening, delicious, passionate feelings that it brings. In fact, we were trained, as a generation, to fear love. And so you know what we do? We settle. We stop the search as soon as there is someone ‘suitable.’ And that, my dear, is the problem. It isn’t about finding someone suitable, someone who meets X number of items on a list, someone that our families or friend groups will accept. It’s about finding that wonderfully unique person that challenges you to be more everyday, finding someone that isn’t afraid to express their affection for you, someone that compliments you and makes you feel that you have found some part of yourself that you never even knew needed to be found.
You know, I’ve been in love four times. And each love was appropriate for that phase of life. It was never perfect but it was always passionate. It always made me think things I never would have thought, required me to explore new depths of the human experience that are all encompassing - spiritual, physical, mental, emotional. And when it ended, I always felt a great lost. Nonetheless, I never felt a loss that truly made me believe that life would not go on.
But let me just tell you the one thing I realized when I found the one. I didn’t come to love him easily. It was a lot of work, a lot of a stress, a lot of self-realization. But never had I ever felt such a need in my heart to fight for someone the way I did for him. You know, I really couldn’t imagine waking up and knowing that he wouldn’t be there. That he wouldn’t be my first thought or consideration. I just refused to live without him. And I’ll tell you what the trick was about all of this….he fought for me in the exact same way.
Love is a battlefield and you can’t stand down for the challenge. You have to go in fully amoured with your guns up. But you can’t raise that gun to the other person. You’ve got to be side by side, fighting for the exact same thing. And that is what I do for him. We don’t always agree. In reality, we never agree. But I want this life with him. I choose him and he chooses me. We choose us. And once we just shed ourselves of that fear of what may happen, what may come tomorrow, that is when we discovered the beauty of true love.
— Anonymous contributor.
