Here’s the whole story: I don’t get love.
I mean, I get lots of love from lovely, lovely people.
But I don’t understand how it works, how you find it, how you keep it, what makes you patient and engrossed with another person for a whole lifetime because of it, and how you overcome all the things you need to overcome to keep it in your heart and in your life forever.
I have dozens of great examples around me, mind you.
My parents are still married after a gazillion years, and I can honestly say they don’t stick with it for the financial benefits or out of habit. I’m lucky to watch them do their thing.
I have many friends who are happily married, too… however that looks for them.
Which could be a clue: it looks different for everyone.
Still, as with assembling IKEA furniture, watching it happen for years and years has brought me no closer to fathoming how it happens.
I don’t buy any of the old saws:
Love shows up when you least expect it.
Love shows up when you’re not looking for it.
Love is just a matter of finding that one person.
Love is a matter of putting yourself out there.
If love shows up when you least expect it, then a whole lot of people should be experiencing the romantic equivalent of Ed McMahon showing up on their doorstep pretty damn soon. Because they haven’t expected it in a while.
If love shows up when you’re not looking for it, well…. again… a lot of people should be getting startled by true love while showering or clipping their toenails or eating a large bag of chips and watching a stupid movie on TBS.
If love is a matter of finding that one person, we should really be rebounding off all the wrong people like reverse magnets, instead of living with them for years on end until everything melts down, and then spending another few years wondering what the hell we were doing in the first place.
If love is a matter of putting yourself out there, club kids and cougars would fall in love every day.
Then again, maybe they do.
Maybe it’s not that I don’t get love… I just don’t get how I love, or how love is going to look for me when I finally stumble onto it for real. So far, love has felt like a lot of making up for something I lack, or wondering what the other person was thinking, or trying to be everything for someone who didn’t really seem to need half of what I was, or feeling badly that they didn’t have this other person they’d wanted more. And then it felt like nothing.
That sounds bitter. I’m not sure it is, though. Just honest.
I know the things I lack, the stuff I don’t bring to the table. I am not the smartest, the prettiest, the thinnest, the funniest, the wisest, the most peaceful, the least conflicted, the healthiest, the most interesting. I don’t know who is, but it’s not me. And on a lot of levels, I have to be okay with that, because you can’t conjure qualities you don’t have out of thin air. All you can do is try.
But that’s so far from anything I imagine love is about.
Love isn’t about a matching system or a list of compatibilities. Half the couples I see walking around look as though they were randomly selected from a bowlful of people and attached at the hand. I’m sure they love one another, because you can see it, but there’s no obvious outward qualities that really make them make sense.
Which I love.
And which is also why I loathe eHarmony and resume dating and a good portion of the questions people ask one another when they first meet, because I could give you a list of things about me that would impress you, and I could make my life sound great, and I could tell you all the things I wanted in someone else and maybe you would go, “Awesome! Me too!”
Would we really know anything, though? Would we be compatible, or would our fantasies just enjoy going on a date? Would you know the things about me that are actually lovely?
Will it matter to you in thirty years that I can play a mean round of poker and I enjoy the outdoors and I can cook you a meal that will make your eyes roll back in your head and I wear excellent perfume and can flirt like a demon when I try?
Or will it matter more that I can forgive in a heartbeat and will scratch your back when you’re tense and I laugh at even the most stupid jokes and I will think you are beautiful even when you’re not? (Oh… and I’ll be nice to your mom.)
I really don’t know.
Where does love actually begin?
Is friendship based on chemistry where it starts?
Or is sex that turns into genuine like for the other person where it starts?
Is chemistry important at all? It has to be, I think, but how important?
Or is a decision where it starts? And continues? And ends?
Or does it just happen and no one knows why or how but it does and hopefully it happens to you? Huzzah?
My mother taught me that all you can do is be the best person you can be and love others as much as possible, and beyond that, you’d just have to see.
Easy for her to say. She got married at 19, cute as a bug’s ear, and has more talent and love in her little finger than most of us have in every organ of our bodies.
But I know she’s right. And I know I’m not the best person I can be.
So that could be a start.
Oh… and if the key to love is just not thinking about it, well… yeah, I’m done for.
Granted, I am content to let a lot of it be a mystery. Really.
But I wouldn’t mind if love made sense for ten minutes. Long enough for me to dance around in blissful certainty to exactly two love songs.
I think that would get me happily to 40, at least.
Or tomorrow.
