How prepared does love leave you to walk away? Even love for the sake of loving is not pure in its demands. Love has no rationality and knows no bounds. It exceeds far more quickly the bounds of the heart than hatred but its boundlessness is also the curse that draws the innocents, moth-like to its flame to be beckoned, taunted, and inevitably engulfed in its impassioned dance of chemicals and fumes.
When you try to cling to who you were you come to realize you don’t know her anymore. Try as we may, we fall into the haze, the intoxicating glow of romance. We are hypnotized by the fairytale of what could be, someday and when we save up. There are so many of us seeking love, embracing love and hoping to retain love. Regardless of age, no matter how mature and reasonable we become we are still guilty of falling prey to the temptation to love and be loved in return. We think that, to live as we do, to be as we are, you have to be in love, because like so many things in this world, it doesn’t make sense.
Drunk on intentional naïveté, feigned innocence and a dream of being in a proverbial mutually fulfilling relationship we drop our guard. We forget the goals that once made up our entire existence. We forge ahead creating time where there was none before. Giving up appointments, being late for work and skipping plans with those other than our beloved. We drown ourselves in the high love creates. We strive to take in every sweet memory and every lingering touch as though it will never exist again. In the honeymoon of our affections we dread the loss of this great love more deeply than many of the lasting relationships we already possess. Like infants we become inconsolable until the figure that meets these needs returns to our sight. Fearing abandonment, betrayal or worse, returning to our lives as they were before the momentous encounter that brought this other into our lives we cling to every call. We savor every text and pour over the comments shared with friends. Advertising our joy becomes our highest calling and the focus of all energies not drained in love making. As we look to others to quantify our emotions we share to prove that what we think is happening really is there. We are terrified of sharing too much and also too little because what if we forget, what if tomorrow this bliss is gone suddenly, much as it came into our lives.
It is this dread that is most disconcerting. Because when love is used to manipulate, how quickly we can release ourselves from the tentacles that we have intertwined and mingled into the rest of our lives. So many victims of abuse seek refuge with the very person who harms them most. Remembering, realistically or imagining that a time existed when the relationship was better, their partner kinder and their lives sweeter. They cling to a dangerous relationship in hopes of evoking some desire in the other person to come back to that utopian place. Returning to a time when things were supposedly better. Though the desire to live and love completely exists it is dangerous to fall too swiftly, too deeply or too sickly in love. Because when love becomes obsession or controlling it ceases to be love and becomes some other animal that is tortured, cruel and hungry. Love exists when you do not need the other person but rather you want them in your life. Teaching our children the difference between these two emotions is paramount. Our relationships must be allowed to blossom and come to wholesome fruition. We need never be the victims of abuse, we need to learn when enough is enough and when to walk away.
