 |
| My parents. I think they really dug each other. Look at my dad. Don't you want to be looked at like that? |
I've been thinking a lot about love lately. Why we use the phrase fall in love instead of soar into love, melt into love, expand into love. So many possibilities. Fall out of love seems right. But why fall in?
How is it that you can commit your life to being with someone and then it doesn't work out? You promised. Now you're un-promising? How is it that you can laugh hysterically with someone for an entire summer and then just up and decide Nope. How can you waste weeks trying to convince someone that you really have nothing in common when you're so attracted to that someone that the house burned down every time he walked in the door? How can you love one person and then find that you also accidentally love someone else but you still love that other person too? Can you fall in love just by reading a person's words when you've never even met him? What if you never meet him? Will you go on loving him?
I fell in love when I was 15. Does that even count? Does it have more traction because we had a baby? Why don't I ever think of that man I was married to for 30 years? Am I a psychopath? Is it pure survival? Can you survive love? Can you fall in love with someone so gradually you would have never predicted it? How slow can love go? How fast? If Train A leaves the station at 4pm and is traveling 40 mph and Train B leaves the station at 8pm, traveling 60mph, how many hours will it take for Train B to pass train A? If there are lovers on those trains, what will happen then? Can you fall in love with someone when you don't really ever talk? How in the hell can a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening and have nothing to say? (This last question courtesy of John Prine)
I'm asking. Just asking. Tell me. Tell me what you know. I'm listening. Tell me a story. Your story. Tell me everything you know.
11 comments:
Love never dies. It just goes underground.
I have no answers to any of those questions. I fell in love so many times. The first time I really fell in love and then after awhile he told me he didn't love me anymore, I thought I would die. I thought I would never get over the pain.
How often do I think of him?
Almost never.
I accidentally fell in love with my husband. I didn't want to. He was too tall. He had been a jock. He was still a jock. He was a hunter. He had a huge family who liked to visit. But then I just couldn't help it. He loved me. He was so tall because his heart was too big to fit into a regular body. His family was all about love. I learned to eat venison. He was so good to my kids. We had two more kids. Now we have grandkids. So far, so good. I still love the hell out of him. He still loves me. Things get bumpy sometimes. Tides come in, tides go out.
They always come back in.
Thirty one years. Still coming in.
I have no idea why.
About ten years ago I was camping with my husband (of 22 years then) and we were sitting around the campfire and I thought to myself if this was my last night on earth I would die happy....to me that has always been my benchmark of love...and I am going to enjoy as long as I have it...
Good questions. I don't know. I've had sweetness and I've had utter weirdness. Maybe I'll fall in love again, but I really have no idea. My last love weathered 35 years and a friendship for 10 years before that. He was a big part of my life. Before I married him and had a huge flock of kids with him, I'd been in love, deeply once even. I thought I'd live out my life with Mr. 35-years. He said yes, yes we would, even as he was quietly and secretly trying on other lovers for size for a number of years. Am I that easy to distract? That easy to manipulate? Was he really that much of a sociopath? I don't know. Love just falters and goes away sometimes. I'm not really over it, not in the way that he is over it, although the last act was 4 years ago. I'm over it enough that I want other things now and I don't want to see him and I don't want to be with him, but, oh, all those years. Trying to recreate myself in this way at age 63 seems crazy. But, then, what else can I do? So that's what I do.
T and I have been married for almost 44 years. We got married when we were both 19. Our marriage has had its ups and downs, like everyone else. Of course we love each other deeply. Of course we are committed to this thing called marriage. We share many aspects of our lives, but we also try to remain individuals with space to ourselves. Why did it work out for us? It is just dumb luck, I think, that we are compatible. But if I was to give my view on the big secret of a long relationship I guess I would say that it is important to like each other. You can love anyone - even horrible creeps who treat you badly and think only of themselves. So, in addition to feeling love, you really need to like the guy. Liking is what gets you through each day.
Sometimes I think love, like anything worth pursuing, is just in the showing up. Besides that, its many manifestations only make sense to the people involved. And then there is the issue of biology, where what turns your knees to butter might just be some chemical reaction. And the other person has no idea. When you get buttery knees from a person who keeps showing up, and who also gets buttery knees from you, then that's the one. I have been in love so many times, but it is only now that I get this.
The first time I fell in love wasn't with my boyfriends, or my first husband--though i thought that kind of terror and misery was love. It was when my son was born and I held him in the blue milk-light of the hospital room and I felt like I was torn asunder. And when i somehow, by some magic, met my now-husband and felt both safe and electric and he loved his boy and is good and loving to my boy. I don't know how it works. I don't know how I believed what I felt toward my first husband was love except that until my boy was born I didn't know what love was at all. It still scares me, that I love these people. That I'm capable.
a psychic once told me to teach my daughter that love is not a feeling of turmoil and angst, love is a feeling of deep ease.
i love that, a feeling of deep ease. this is how i felt when i first met my husband, excited because i thought he was so hot, and yet that deep ease in his company, like i was meeting him again after a long absence, and i already loved him.
i wish that for my girl, and my boy, too.
I know nothing but I deeply love this post, the responses and your writing. Oh and Angella's answer.
What Angella said. I remember when I fell in love with Mr. Moon, I kept thinking, "But this doesn't hurt."
Ah-hah!
I think there are many types of love. I read something the other day that real love is listening to a person and truly hearing them. I'm working on it. I have a tendency to see what I want instead of what is. My ex-husband showed me who he truly was before I married him but I preferred my version of him, until I couldn't lie to myself anymore. That's why I worry about me and the big guy because I wonder if I'm just lying to myself again. I don't want to blame my parents but it sure would have been nice to have felt loved growing up.
And so it goes. Baby steps.
Post a Comment