Not two days ago I found out that Jessica is “dating” someone (or, at least, she’s going on dates with someone and really excited about it). The news dredged up all sorts of bottom-feeding monsters, a mixed bag of emotion clouding my perception of things. While we haven’t talked in quite some time, and while for all intensive purposes the friendship is all but “dead and gone,” the news did bring a certain amount of pain. Not because I want to be with her—I don’t—but because I invested much of my time, thoughts, and hope into the idea of “us” that this brings it to its grave. May such hopes rest in peace. The death of yet another hope strikes deep, like a barb hooked into my left ventricle and pulling with every breath. Again I succumbed to a foolish hope, and again I’m seeing how truly foolish such hopes are. What’s the point of hoping for “true love” when reality tells you, without pausing for a breath, that such “true love” is a lie, something yearned for but never realized? And so we become cold and calloused skeletons dressed in moth-eaten rags, jaded creatures with downtrodden scowls and milky yellow faces carved with deep-set and empty eyes.
At this point, any pain felt over knowing that “The Girl” has found someone else is quickly drowned by this deep-rooted skepticism. But at the same time, I know that my cynicism may one day be destroyed by me actually experiencing something wonderful. “Love is stronger than the Grave.” If something has the power to uproot logic in a single strike, it needs to be taken into account. It matters. And real love is like that, a mystical and magical organism whose mere presence dismembers cynicism at the seams.
“True Love.” Not this pie-in-the-sky, happy-go-lucky unicorn that gets around like a crack-whore ten bucks short, but the real deal. An authentic love that doesn’t run from the world but embraces it, two souls conjoined and standing locked together before the world, a levee refusing to break under the shrieking hurricanes. “Life’s a bitch, so let’s do this thing together.” The kind of love where two people meet and connect on that supra-spiritual level and make a decision of the will to love and be loved, and actually do it. Such love is real. I’ve seen it and felt it: knowing you’d do anything, even leaving, just to see her happy and her dreams coming true. As iron sharpens iron, so true love seeps into the marrow of our bones and reworks us, and like a phoenix rising we become something different. Not one person exalted about the miasma but two becoming one (1+1=1), showing a world driven by selfishness, greed, and lust that there’s a different way to be human, a different way to do this thing we call Life.
That is what I mean by true love, not this “You’re hot and kinda cool, so I’m totally into you” bullshit. The kind of love I’m talking about goes beyond looks and beyond personality (not to denounce these things as unimportant; I’m too much a realist to know that 90% of the time, these factors decide who does and doesn’t want to be your mate); this kind of love looks deeper, into the heart, into the core of who we are. Our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our vices. Our evil and the skeletons in our closets; our issues and quirks and inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies. All of this, known and beheld, then embraced and cherished for all its flaws and shortcomings. Two people, coming to love and appreciate the other, knowing that life together is better than life alone, sharing in the journey and experiencing together the dark alleys and Babylonian gardens, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of all that life has to offer. Granted, this love doesn’t just happen. It must be worked at, cultivated, grown and nurtured. Under the right conditions, and with the right care, such love will blossom and spread, radiating outwards and making people turn their heads—“Okay, that’s weird, what’s going on over there?”
But cynicism doesn’t easily die, and nor should it. Once hope consumes us to the point where we become illogical in our perception of the world, there’s a problem. The kind of love above, this caricature sketch of true love, it’s something I’ve seen, something I know to be real. But for every instance of true love coming to bear on the world like a shot out of the dark, there’s plethora of the opposite. “Love” is replaced with bitterness and annoyance, and the relationship is underscored with a discontentment feeding the adulterous heart. True love can turn beasts into beauties, but more often we find beauties turned into beasts. Hoping for true love can’t be done blindly, in a vacuum outside real life, fueled by the ridiculous notions of Disney and Pixar, birthed in Medieval tales and without any substance in real life. This is something we can’t do; we can’t just swallow the pill and go on our way. The reality is that this world doesn’t cater to true love, and the difficulty of finding true love is compounded by the fact that, as human creatures, we are inherently self-centered. Selfish, greedy, indifferent. That’s us. Homo incurvatus en se, as Augustine put it: human beings turned in on themselves. True love has at its foundation selflessness, generosity, kindness, forgiveness. It involves commitment, sticking it out when it’s the last thing we want to do. Instead of abandoning the relationship when it gets too hard, and instead of running into mistress’ arms when we can’t get what we want at home, we need to address the issues and wrestle through them, for the betterment of ourselves and our union.
Compounding this, the fact is that true love can flourish only when both people are on the same page. As the old saying goes, “It takes two to tangle.” True love is a symbiotic relationship, not an autonomous one. And no matter your love, your commitment, your loyalty, and your determination to make the relationship shine out above the rest, the sad truth is that if the Other doesn’t want that, if the Other’s not picking up what you’re laying down, then, well, and to be quite frank, you’re screwed.
Of course, these dangers can quite often be avoided. Be conscious of the Red Flags. Flee from the psychos, the crazies, the manipulative and controlling chicks. Don’t leap into something with someone if there’s no compatibility or potential, and in your attraction, don’t gloss over those things that will erect spikes in the road, because while the exhilaration of the chase and the euphoria of the attraction is borderline hallucagenic, the in-setting of reality will turn this dreamscape into a nightmare. And while it’s fun to point out the flaws and short-comings of other people, let’s try and be somewhat mature and do some serious introspection ourselves. Not the “introspection” of the tool-bags that list it as one of their favorite activities on Facebook, the kind where you look in the mirror and say, “I’m a f*cking demi-god,” but the raw and honest introspection, where we dig through our closets and dust off our skeletons and try and figure out how to get those bleach-white bones clothed. Half of the difficulties found in True Love would be calmed down if we’d just take a moment or two to make wise decisions and to better ourselves for the possible landmark vocation of marriage, of uniting yourself with another.
Already the chances of true love are dwindling, and the biggest hurdle has yet to be tackled: life. Don’t buy into the BS about life being a sweet garden begging to be picked. This world is its own post-apocalyptic hellhole, a wasteland scarred by Death & Decay, and to quote The Band Perry, “Who knew forever could be severed by the sharp knife of a short life?” My greatest fear: not never finding true love, but finding it and then having it taken from me in a meaningless gamble of cause-and-effect. It wouldn’t be any sort of Slow Death; it’s be an outright evisceration. And as much as we’d like to think that we’ll grow up and old together, love is repeatedly ripped asunder by this cruel and senseless world, and we’re left alone to try and pick up the pieces, to sift through the ashes, but there’s no phoenix to rise.
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