Love

I’m back. I’ve been gone for a while. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t have anything to say. Far from it...I’ve had lots to say. I’ve had many things I wanted to say that just took to many words to say well. There were things I wanted to say that would be too easily misunderstood by people, resulting in great wars of words that I really had no intention of causing and little desire to continue to fight in. Heck, there were things I wanted to say that I knew would almost willfully be misinterpreted or twisted into something else, just so that person could angrily make their own point in response; and I had no desire to deal with that. There was also the issue of time…there were so many good things to write about, but not enough time in which to write them all.

But this month is special. It’s February…the month of love. So for a month of Tuesdays, I’m going to talk about love in one way or another.

And now that I’ve said all that, I’d better get to work!

There are a lot of things I know now about love that I wish I’d known when I was younger. These are things that I think that young people should know now, so that they can love wisely, well, and…as much as possible. That last one may seem a little odd, but I think that in time you’ll understand what I’m saying.

To begin with, there are lots of ways to love someone. And here I’m not even talking about the three ways that I learned about in church (fillia, eros, and agape). I’m talking about the many ways to love someone romantically. There are the loves that last for decades. There are the loves that last a few years, months, or even weeks…whether we intend them to be or not. There are the loves that are spoken of, but not acted on…for any of a number of reasons. And with all these ways of loving someone, perhaps aiming for that “one undying love” misses the point, misses many opportunities to love and be loved, and misses the opportunity to have your life enriched by those loves.

I realized many years too late that I missed a chance to love someone who had a boyfriend back home. This person probably loved me too, but I was too dense to pick up the hint because in my simplistic, binary, yes or no way of thinking at the time, I figured that if she had a boyfriend there, she couldn’t possibly be interested in me. I didn’t understand until years later that we could still love each other as people who weren’t that “one undying love.” I didn’t realize that we could still be something to each other for just a short while at school, until she eventually graduated and married the guy back home.

In our youthful idealism, we tend to think that love conquers all, or that love should be able to conquer all. But it doesn’t. And maybe it shouldn’t. Perhaps love…real love…knows when it’s time to bow out and call it quits…for the sake of the beloved. We think that if it didn’t last “forever”, maybe it wasn’t real love…or a waste of everyone’s time. But perhaps the greatest love is that of the person who says, “I’m not right for you, there’s someone out there better for you than me, and I’m preventing the two of you from finding each other.” Perhaps this kind of love does go on forever, but just in a different form…as a deep and abiding friendship. And sometimes fighting to keep that romantic relationship alive can kill the friendship that sparked the romance to begin with.

And with this, let me say that perhaps the best breakups are where the one doing the breakup leaves the person feeling good about themselves…and the relationship…in the end.

And let’s talk about all those “temporary” relationships…those short term “flings” of even as short as a week…or a weekend. Let’s not devalue those simply because they didn’t go the distance. Was there love and caring there? Was there a sense of “this is the only time we’ll have to be with each other, so let’s take it so that we can say we always had Paris”? I’ve had Paris…or at least Petaluma…and I’d take those three weeks again. On the other hand, I may have missed Ostrom because I didn’t want to “waste the time” of someone who I knew wasn’t ultimately right for me…even though I loved her. Who knows…maybe she would’ve been happy to say that at least we had that for a few months. And perhaps those few months of what we both knew would just be a temporary relationship would’ve enriched us both.

Oh…there is so much more I could say here, but I think I’ve gone on too long already. But tune in next week for some more of my thoughts on love.