Love...

Love comes in many forms. There's the love of a family - often strained and tested, because families are more times than not made up of people who may never have chosen one another otherwise. There's the love of friends - transient and fickle at times because people come and go, but for those who are blessed with a life-long friend it's steady and true and chosen. But this isn't about those kinds of love. This is about the other kind of love, the kind that most people yearn for and seek out whether they possess any true understanding of it or not. This is about the love that buckles your knees, that sweeps you off your feet, the romantic love that many people give up on finding.

Fairy tales are just that...fairy tales. They leave out the day-to-day, real-life things like bills, kids, families, jobs, etc. These are the things that can cause the glow of romantic love to fade. People can smother love, choke the life out of it with insecurities and fear.
People can mistake jealousy for love, anger for passion, and completely misconstrue the reality of a relationship all because the heart gets involved. Face it, love can make people act crazy. It can turn a world upside-down or set it right. It can make you run or steel you against anything. I suppose like anything else in life, it's all about your perspective, your collected experiences, and your willingness to try.


My favorite fairy tale always was (and still is) "Beauty and the Beast".


"Yes, yes," said the Beast, "my heart is good, but still I am a monster."
"Among mankind," says Beauty, "there are many that deserve that name more than you, and I prefer you, just as you are, to those, who, under a human form, hide a treacherous, corrupt, and ungrateful heart." ~ Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont Beauty and the Beast.


I think I always got that about love, that in its truest form it goes beyond what's on the outside, that it can transcend the physical limits of the people involved. Maybe my life would have been easier if I had perfected the frail woman role of Snow White so I could be rescued, or simply dreamed of the fancy dresses and home of Cinderella and looked for a wealthy prince. But that's me, chase after the loftiest idea of what love is with the tenacity of a mother wolverine.

Most of my attempts at having this kind of reciprocated love were failures. Hell, all of them until my current husband. Lots of people have this notion that by loving someone with everything you have, you can fix them or change them somehow or that they'll want to change for you. I wasn't any different in the beginning, I didn't try to change anyone, I just foolishly thought they'd think enough of me to change certain things. Well I can tell you this, you can't fix someone who doesn't want fixing or doesn't think anything is wrong. You also can't fix stupid...or cheaters, liars, nut-jobs, and the clueless.


What I always wanted - yearned for - was a passionate love. My parents are a generation, it seems, that thinks love just fades into the everyday and that passion naturally goes away with time, that it's not meant to last. I honestly can't recall them holding hands much less kissing. I wanted excitement, a deep connection, a man who wanted me, couldn't keep his hands or his eyes off of me, who kissed me like he wanted to be inside me, who would take me when he wanted me, who made no secret of how much he wanted me...I could go on and on and on. 


What I learned from my first marriage is that wanting something badly and working to have what you want don't amount to shit when you want something from someone that they just can't give. I'm reminded of something he said numerous times, "Wish in one hand, shit in the other and see which one fills up fastest." I finally figured that one out as far as he was concerned.

But I woke up, smelled the shit and moved on......


Another funny thing I've learned about love is that you don't get to plan it. Love has it's own plan, it's own schedule. You can't plan when you're going to fall in love any more than you can plan who it will be with. If you're thinking that you can, you may want to dig out those little papers called "restraining orders" that you tossed aside and brush up on some details.


When I met my new husband, falling in love was the farthest thing from my mind. I had just faced the realization that the first husband had been cheating on me, I didn't have a clue what to do, where to go or how to start over. Love was the least of my concerns. But God and fate have a way of intervening when it's needed most.


Honestly, I had suppressed my own desires and happiness for so long in the first marriage, overlooking the signs that it just wasn't right or good for me, that my subconscious was taking over. I'd been trying for years to kick-start some sort of passion. Finally, I was done begging for attention, affection and passion. I was losing weight and sleep. I would go out driving during the day, listening to music, always songs about passionate love and finding your way out of the bad places you end up in sometimes. 


But when I saw Tracy, my heart was up and running, faster than I could process what was happening. For the first time, my mind - weary with everything that was going on, couldn't override my heart. After so many years of being numb, finding that passionate love I had craved was frightening, all of my walls were down, finally, and I was determined not to let them go back up again. Of course that also meant feeling anger, rage, sorrow, the whole range of emotions, good and bad. But that's another lesson I learned, you can't have passion without all the other emotions. If you lock yourself away from pain, you also lock yourself away from joy.


This seems like it's rambling to me, I hope its not, but that's kind of what passionate love is like. It's like a wild rambling rose growing through every crack and gap, becoming a part of every inch it touches, holding tight with its thorns.


Other things I've learned about love...


You have to love yourself in order to find real love with someone else. If you can accept yourself, the good and the bad, and love yourself, then you'll be in a good place for loving someone else. It means you won't give up who you are or your dreams just to hold onto someone.

You have to know the things you want, the deal breakers, what you can deal with and what you can't. Stick to those things and don't settle. It's hard when you're lonely, I've settled out of fear of loneliness, so I understand completely but I've also had to recover myself at the other end of that scenario. If you walk into a relationship being 100% true to who you are - no dressing to impress, no tolerating things that you wouldn't normally tolerate, no going along with things to fit with someone - and it doesn't work out, then you haven't lost anything and there's no blame to place. If you're being you, and they're being true to who they are then it's all fair and there's no blame to place. If you've honestly done this a failed relationship doesn't make either of you wrong, it just makes you not right for each other. I know lots of people who go into relationships, ignoring things they don't like, thinking they can change the other person somehow, who - when it crumbles - can't see how they had any role in what went wrong.

Love doesn't solve life's problems and it doesn't just stick around needing no effort. You have to work at it. You have to make time for love and passion. If only one person is making the effort, eventually that one person will grow weary. If no one is trying...well, there's nothing there anymore, is there? Love needs space, time, patience, effort, forgiveness, a compass, an accomplice and it needs to be needed.


You can't force love. It either grows or withers, and that's completely dependent on you. I've heard it said that making a relationship last means falling in love with the same person over and over. I used to interpret that as meaning it was natural to fall out of love with someone and then you'd work to get it back. But I learned that it doesn't come back if it goes and if it goes, it has either simply run its course or it wasn't really love. Sometimes we fall in "love" with people because they're close enough to what we want, or as close as we think we'll get to it and we rationalize that "right now" person into the "right" person.

Love, quite simply, is everything it's cracked up to be - the good, the bad, the beautiful and the awful. I suppose the fact that it does have a down-side is why people can be skeptical of true love. And you really shouldn't be. I've been there. You can't control love, you can't pick who you fall in love with - timing, circumstances, situations, previous experiences - all play a part in how you react to everything else in your life including the people you meet. People come and go, some are there just to teach you something, some are there to get you through something, and when you've learned the things you needed to learn, and gotten through the things you needed to move through the door is wide open for the love that was intended for you all along.

I am loved in spite of my imperfections because I can look beyond those things in others...
I am loved for who I am because I can love people for who they are....
I am loved beyond measure because that is how I love...
and I can do this now because rather than running from love after going through the bad and awful of it I ran toward it. I learned from my experiences. I learned who I really am at my core and I learned to love myself. 


And now I have the thing I always knew I wanted...
A Beautiful, Crazy..........LOVE.....