Anyone who says love is free has never truly been in love. Your lover will need comfort. Your spouse will have bad days. Your child will have their heart broken, more than once and you will be expected to help pick up the pieces. Your beloved pets become a parade of joy and loss. Love costs, sometimes it costs everything you have, and sometimes it costs more. On those days you weigh the joy you gain against the pain; you weigh the energy given from the loving and the energy lost from the duties that love places upon us. Love can be the most expensive thing in the world. If it’s worth it, great, but if not, then love does not conquer all, sometimes you are conquered by it. You are laid waste before the breathtaking pain of it, and crushed under the weight of it’s obligations.
I posted the above yesterday on FaceBook, and got a lot of responses to it. Most of you totally understood the post, and many of you said that it helped. I’m glad, because it says to me that I’m not the only one tired of the “romance ideal”. This idea that there is only one special person and if you miss them you’re life is ruined, or if you love someone hard enough they will change into the person you need them to be when most people are incapable of changing who they fundamentally are, and the happily-ever-after myth.
The reason most fairy tales end with, “and they lived happily ever after,” is because they couldn’t figure out how to write it for real. Falling in love is a great place to start, but it is the beginning, not the end. We live in a culture that shows that first mad, crazy falling in love as the only true love. Science has proven that the falling in love phase is chemically induced and will last between two months and two to five years, which is why so many people think they’ve falling out of love when the magic hormones tone down. But that’s when the real work of “happily ever after” begins. Love that lasts isn’t effortless. A few people said, my post was too dark, and they hoped I felt better. I wasn’t feeling bad, just the uncertainties of two dogs in vet this week both of which will be fine, and really tired of the fluffy, bunny, talk show ideals that people keep thinking are the real stuff of love. The reason most romance novels don’t concentrate much beyond the happy ending is that it’s damn hard to write what comes next, because in among the great sex, wonderful moments, and truly loving people more and more with each year are the moments that aren’t so wonderful. Jon and I are both introverts with good social skills, but we need alone time, and couple time, and family time with our daughter, and . . . so much. But when things are really tough, we have an endearment for each other.
One of us will take the hands of our beloved in ours, gaze deeply and lovingly into each others’ eyes and will say, “I hate you less than anybody else in the world, right now.”
The other of us, will smile that smile that is joy, love, mischief, and just years of truly understanding each other, and say back with all the feeling of any movie declaration you’ve ever seen, “And I hate you less anybody else in the world, too.”
If you’ve been together less than five years, or have no children, you may not understand this term of endearment, but for many of you I think you’ll understand it just fine.
