I just finished reading Love the One You're With by Emily Giffin. It's about a marriage and how everything seems perfect, from the girl's perspective, but then LO AND BEHOLD her ex-love waltzes into the picture like if he owns it. She goes back and for if she still loves him and her commitment to her husband. Bottom line, she doesnt cheat and realizes love is a commitment and decision not nights filled with passion. I don't know if I want to agree with her. I mean it makes sense and it is what they teach us (us referring to Christians, especially Catholics). I have a problem with that though. How can love be merely a decision when sometimes when you're with your SOS you start feel this tingly sensation in the pit of tummy? then it starts to rise and fill your veins with a giddy/butterfly sensation which flows throughout your entire body where you feel as if you cant breathe and you cant wipe off that goofy grin that has begun to form on your face? I'm not talking about that initial love; that excitement when you realize you do truly care for that other person. I'm talking about the love between couples (married or not) that have been together for years and still get this feeling. Was love just a decision; a commitment, then?
I don't think so. I think love is both. It's the feeling we get when our lover does something fantastic, its a feeling when you realize that he/she is all yours, when you have a nightmare and can just turn over and make him hug you until it goes away. It's when you've been gone for a few days for x reason and you get back home and he has that puppy dog face and exhale with relief never realizing that until then you weren't really breathing. However, love isnt only those things. It's also deciding whether to take a job offer somewhere where you know he/she won't like, its about deciding whether to eat out with the girls for a second night in a row or staying in and watching True Blood.
love is a lot more complicated and multifaceted than most would like to think. We wish it were simple, but its not. And sometimes, love means hurting someone else...
2 comments:
I agree that love is complicated... probably the most complex emotion that we endure.
When I think of true love, I think of my grandparents who were married 60 years. They had their share of hard times -- my grandfather was a POW in WWII and was MIA when my father was born. My grandmother didn't know if he was alive, or if she'd ever see him again. They struggled with many things over the years -- the same kinds of difficulties that life brings to all of us. But they stayed together. They met the challenges together. They laughed together, and they triumphed together.
When my grandmother died, my grandfather followed soon after. His spirit was so broken by the loss of her, that his heart just gave up. After all that time with her by his side, life alone just wasn't worth living.
I have a twenty-something brother in law who is perpetually starting new relationships and then ending them a few months later. He'll tell us that the excitement was gone. It makes me sad, and each time I think to myself, "You didn't even give yourself the chance to discover what love is!"
Katy: Both sets of my grandparents have stayed married, which makes me happy. However, sometimes you had to wonder. My grandmother past away a few years ago, and I think that my grandfather loves her more now then he did when she was a live. Not because he's happy that she's dead, but I think it's because he only remembers the good things and times. That isn't true love to me.
I think your grandparents is an example of true love becasue they fought through really hard times, and its what i strive for. But I still want, 60 years down the line, to have the spark. I would hate to think of love just a decision, like the character in my book.
I have many friends who have your brother-in-law's mindset. As a twenty-something myself I would like to say it's age, but I know it's not. I have many friends who act like, but I also have many friends who are extremely committed. I think it has to do with maturity.
Thank you for checking my post. =)
Post a Comment