Thoughts About Love

"The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along."   
    — Rumi (The Illuminated Rumi)

I've been thinking lately a lot about love.  Truth be told, I've always thought about love.  I remember as a child that I thought love was Maureen O'hara being dipped and passionately kissed by John Wayne.  It always made me blush.  And then when I was a teenager, I thought love was something that happened at a football game; the quarterback eyeing the water-girl as she tends to his injury, and she is clueless all the while of his feelings for her.  And then they marry after graduation and have babies.  When that didn't happen, I started considering that maybe love was scientific and mathematical, and that was pretty depressing as I've never been good at arithmetic.  And then, in my early twenties, it occurred to me that love was a whirlwind.  It happened faster than you could determine the time of day.  And then the whirlwind ended and love was over and replaced with something quite different.  At first it felt like hate, but in time I learned to recognize it as hurt.

Now, I don't know what love is or how it is found.  I'm 28 years old.  I've lived a lot of life and I've learned from living.  Outside of my own dating mishaps, you wouldn't believe how many times I've had conversations with other women my age where love just eludes.  Or conversations with women my age where they truly thought they had love and everything was so great and then one day, it was no more... it was just gone.  It's all very disappointing.  And then there is my job.  I see divorce every day.  Not just divorce.  I see bitter and hateful divorce every single day where people who once loved each other deeply, only want to hurt each other.  And I wonder, how does that happen?  It's crazy.

I used to think that I was incapable of love.  Seriously.  I used to think that love eluded me because I didn't know how to love.  And I used to think maybe it was a good idea that love has eluded me for so long because then if I can't find it, then I can't lose it.  But, never once have I stopped looking for it.  It's strange.

And I'm not done looking for it, because I know more now than I did when I was 5, 17, and even 25 years old.  What I do know is that I am very capable of loving.  My mission in this world is to love loyally and passionately.  Everyone.  Family, loyal friends, children, and my future love.  I advocate for children.  I don't just stand up for them, but I advocate for them when they have no voice.  And I advocate fearlessly and fervently for them.  I spent 2.5 years in a relationship that I fought for tirelessly, just to learn that it was a lie.  It's taken a lot out of me but I also know that the next one is going to be pleasant and not filled with fighting from the beginning, and I look forward to that.  I also know that to fight that long and that hard for something I believed in, a future with this person, was both foolish and also proved the level of my devotion.  I am not void of love.  I am love.  I just need to find that person that it's worth devoting my love to.  Find.  As if to say, that the person I will "find" is hidden away from me, or lost.  I don't believe they are either.  

Maybe love is about recognizing something of yourself in another person.  And, also recognizing what you lack and desire in a person who has the qualities you can learn from most.  Maybe love isn't about wanting more or any less, either.  Maybe love is about acceptance.  I think that for love to happen, that there needs to be a degree of transparency.  To allow one deserving person to know the hurts of the other so that they know the vulnerability that grows the strength that they love.  Does that make sense?  The hitch to it is knowing who deserves to know your vulnerability in order to understand your strength.  Cause there are a lot of jokers out there, people who pray on the most sacred parts of people and then use those parts against a person to hurt them.  And it seems that there are more jokers than there are princes. And maybe that's the problem.  It's not a matter of what love is in comparison to what it is not.  And it's not about whether love is lost to someone, or they don't know how to love.  Maybe it's that love is used as a weapon in the hands of those who have no desire to love.  

I don't know.  I just know that I'm ready for love.  No more pondering it, but ready to actually find it and experience it on my terms.  The real deal.