who says we can't all be happy? :)

Thursday, September 07, 2006

I have paid my price to live with myself on the terms that I have willed
- Rudyard Kipling

0 comments

Sunday, September 03, 2006

(in case you were wondering, part 1 is here

As stated previously, I don’t entirely believe in the one, but what I do believe in is the basic idea of love, pure and simple, forming the foundation for relationships, including but not restricted to romantic relationships, so to speak. And yet, I’ve asked before and I am still trying to figure out how in the world would anyone recognize love?

We all want it, we all think we’ll eventually find it, but we all don’t know what it is, except in retrospect. We spend our lives trying to find that perfect love, but more often than not we can only hope to learn what it isn’t.

Correction. We spend our lives trying to find that perfect relationship, and when we do we call it love. Because, to quote Ken and Eugene, they really are two different things. Related, yes, but nonetheless different.

It begins with falling in love. Being in love with someone isn’t the same thing as loving someone. Falling in love is a conscious decision, and it happens in one of those magical moments in time, in one of those ephemeral split seconds that demand to be grasped tightly and immediately to prevent their being lost forever. To quote Kenneth again, there is a moment for falling in love.

Falling in love is beautiful, it’s sweet and fairytale and romantic and ideal and happy and desirable, but it isn’t the most permanent of things. It is almost entirely an out of control emotional state, and emotions are hardly reliable, especially when they belong to people like me. However, this emotional state forms the basis for a relationship to begin.

I don’t believe people stay in love with each other forever. Very lucky people do, and then you get the kinds of scenes you see in Kodak and Citybank advertisements, those with old looking couples gazing fondly at one another while watching the sunset or some equally cliché and impossibly blissful picture. But for the normal majority there will come a time when his jokes start sounding stale, when her little habits just stop seeming as cute as they once did, when the thought of seeing one another no longer ignites electric rushes of anticipation. As much as I would like to believe that relationships should be able to propagate themselves, and that love would be an unstoppable force against all odds facing the people in question, I have to recognize that that simply isn’t true.

Falling in love is easy. Staying in love isn’t. Staying in a relationship isn’t either. But given enough effort, and commitment, and time, and lots of other things I can’t even begin to think of, this road leads all the way down the line to the core of love itself.

Neither could have said if their mutual dependence was based on love or convenience but they had never asked the question with their hands on their hearts because both had always preferred not to know.
Love in a Time of Cholera

And if I could, I would wish to end it without rancour and without anger, without the sense of seeing the memories of an almost perfect life go down in flames before me, without a phoenix to rise from the bloody ashes. Because I would like to believe in the possibility of love existing beyond the boundaries of the romantic.

But cest la vie. There is a great difference between that man wants in theory and what is achievable in our imperfect reality.

0 comments