I am the world’s most hopeless romantic, driven by insatiable dreams that all of life is merely a never-ending love story – possibly overwritten at times and convincingly unfeasible the rest of the time. A real love story does not have to be about the plight of two star-crossed individuals. Nowhere is it written that a love story cannot be about a child and their stuffed Pooh Bear, a foodie with a pasta fetish, or an engineer infatuated with architectural design. My story is just about loving life in its entirety. And like any other relationship, there comes a time when you are profoundly ‘in love’, but not really ‘in like’ anymore.
Life has a way of rocketing you to a new height of understanding and then bursting the bubble to leave you plummeting back to earth without a safety net. That hardly means, however, you do not love being alive, or hate your life. Every relationship in life – be it romantic, cerebral, metaphysical, or delusional – will both rock your world and make you question your existence at any moment. Life is simply not hypoallergenic. At some point, it will contain many and potentially very irritating elements. So how do we survive this thing called love? As a noun, Webster calls it “profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person; a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend; sexual passion or desire.” I graciously debunk that myth as I say love extends far beyond a person. Yet, “passionate affection, warm personal attachment, or deep affection” are fair qualifiers. I doubt there is anyone alive that does not harbor relentless love about someone or something in some form or fashion. But what does that mean? With all due respect to Robert Palmer, at what point do we become ‘Addicted to Love?’ Because any form of adult love is extremely addictive. Okay, so I jumped off the rollercoaster into the uncharted abyss. You see, I believe that love in its purest form is a codependency – codependent at best, toxic at worst. No two people are ever on the same page at exactly the same time all the time. Unhealthy confidence and slavish trust are bound to make you scream profanities and slam doors eventually. It is a no-brainer. It may or may not persist, but it will happen. In my life, so far, I have experienced two profound loves, at least per Webster’s definition. And while those loves did not prove to be eternal in nature, I still hopelessly love how they shaped my life. I learned that Pat Benatar was correct - Love is a Battlefield. You pick and choose your battles without regret and trust your partner will respect you for being you in all your independently discombobulated glory, or not. In love, seldom is any one person guilty of being only right or always wrong. We are who we are, not who someone wants us to be. And of course, that does not mean we do not need evaluation, personal reflection, and complete truth-to-self conversations to sustain any form of profound love. But it has to happen on both sides of the equation. Without compromise, the codependency becomes toxic. Oh, I do enjoy ranting about love, even though I am the farthest thing from an expert you can be. But while I do love loving the unlovable, believing in the unbelievable, and embracing the unembraceable, I have graciously accepted that fixing the unfixable is a pointless journey. Grab with gusto that which is attainable and leave the hopelessly broken behind. Ah, but that is fodder for yet another rant.
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AuthorJacque Jarrett Stratman |