Love

Love. The all-encompassing and permeating notion. It took me a long time to release myself from the shame that comes with needing love, partnership, companionship. Not that I have. It’s sort of an eternal struggle. But, the fact that almost every song, movie and conversation one overhears in a coffee shop is touched by the notion of love leads me to believe that we are all obsessed with the elusive concept. The funny thing is, I don’t think any of us has any idea what the hell it means. I think we all want to be understood, and to know that another person knows us almost as well as we know ourselves. I think we all want to find someone that will make us feel that we’re not alone in this world, and prove it to everyone else by holding hands as we walk down the street. I mean that in the most un-cynical way possible. Really! Those of us who are “relationship people” think love means for someone else to fill that void in ourselves that we could never fill ourselves. Others think it means co-dependence and a sense of familiarity or comfort. Others still confuse it with lust. I certainly don’t claim to know. In fact, I probably know to a lesser extent than most. But, what I do know is that one of the most ludicrous acts we engage in is trying to bottle the vast concept of love into the tiny vessel of time. I’ve fallen in love with someone without ever seeing him before. I’ve failed at loving someone who gave me all that he was and all that he had. I’ve fallen in love with a man in an instant. I just knew. I’d known I’d loved him before I met him, as if I’d known him for lifetimes. And maybe I had. One can fall in love multiple times with numerous “soul-mates” and maybe even simultaneously. I believe that’s possible. Although, I admit that I’m still an old-school romantic and I do believe in “the one”.

I fall in love fairly easily. I’ve always been told that this is a weakness. This is one of the big lies. It is a strength to fall in love with someone so easily, to see all the beauty in another person and be so naively blind to the ugliness that may lie within them. That innocence is a beautiful thing. The point is that the ability to feel real love is not determined by a period of time or by knowing what a person’s favourite cereal is or that he makes annoying mouth sounds when he chews. At the risk of sounding overly poetic, it’s about knowing and loving someone’s soul in a way that is inexplicable with our rational mind’s mechanisms for acquiring knowledge. It’s about knowing something that you could not possibly have learnt. When you are truly in love, it doesn’t feel like you’re discovering something new about the other, it’s like you’re remembering who they are. That’s why when you meet someone you love and you’re open to it, it feels like a reunion and not like an introduction.

Maybe that’s what this epidemic of loneliness is all about. Just go with me here. Maybe, we are just missing that person or persons we left somewhere. We can’t remember them but we know they’re there and that they’re looking for us too without even knowing it. The part that hurts with yearning in our heart, hurts in theirs too. Perhaps, the antidote to the pervasive loneliness that haunts us is the one we’ve already met in some alternate lifetime. This sounds like a line out of some cheesy movie. But, to be truly honest, that’s who I’m waiting for. I suppose that any man who has ever entered into my life would tell you that those are some pretty big shoes to fill and I suppose this could sound fairly delusional. I could be paving my way to eternal loneliness with this uncompromising and perhaps childish way of looking at love. But, to quote my dear friend Shauna, “I’m gonna marry Superman.”