Love

One of about 8 chapters in progress for Penguins with Road maps

 

Love

Love is a very powerful word that many people spend their whole lives saying without ever meaning it. But, which do you think would be worse, going an entire lifetime without saying I love you or saying I love you all the time without ever meaning it?                                       

There are different categories that I think most people fit into. There are people who are in love with hating love. There are people who are in love with being in love. There are people who can’t feel love because they won’t let themselves. Lastly, there are a collection of people like me who have no reason to believe in love and are more confused by the feeling then comforted, but yet they keep blindly chasing after it. It seems that I spend my days falling in and out of love because so often love does not love me back, or love said it did and then left.             

 I know I have every reason to give up on love and I don’t mean specifically romantic love, I mean friendship and family mean as well. My earliest examples of love taught me that love will abandon me and ignore it’s responsibilities. Love will lie to me. Love will be selfish. But, none of this treatment was love’s fault.                 

Actually, the common theme in my life so far is that the people that should love me don’t, and the people I should love I don’t. This is really frustrating and disappointing, but the moments that I have felt love and been loved have been the highest points in my life.                                                                                          

My first love is the most tragic. It isn’t because I don’t talk to them anymore and that there was an awful falling out. It was because I woke up after all of high school spent with him and somehow, in the process of getting through my freshman year of college with them, he became my best friend and nothing more. No matter what I did, I couldn’t love him the way that I had. I was different or he was different. Whatever it was…it was over and I was pretty sure I was going to crush him with the news.            

Imagine trying to explain that. Hey I know that you’ve never let me down, things have always been perfect and I’ve never had to hide a single thing from you? I woke up three months ago and realized that I am not in love with you anymore, and I’m sorry.

Rule 1: Don’t fool yourself and don’t take it personally even though it hurts. If the person you love falls out of love with you, they couldn’t help it. They can’t change it. It just happened and if they were like me in that moment, they would have done anything to avoid tearing someone they care about to pieces.

I believe that eavesdropping is something you shouldn't do because no body likes a rubber neck. Then again... I believe that you hear what you are suppose to. I use to work for a retirement home. While I was there I heard a story about love that is hard to forget. I was in the dining room reseting the tables for the next day and there was a very smiley nurse taking care of one of the residents.

The resident asked her what she was so happy. The nurse told the story of her husband. He was her high school sweetheart and somehow she ended up moving on and marrying someone else. Throughout her rocky marriage with her husband it turned out to be something that only her high school sweetheart could help her through. Her marriage ended in divorce and guess who she ended up with. That's right, she had to drag that poor man, her high school sweetheart, through all that before she got it right.

My bank, my dentist, and eye doctor seem to be small town places because when I return to them I am asked questions about my life like they are my family. Hopefully collectively they will help me help me see well enough and have a have a bright enough smile to find my man. My optometrist told me the story of how she met her husband because we were talking about how hard it must be to meet anyone when you are in a female dominated career path. She said that she met her husband as a wrong number that she couldn't stop talking to.

My friend Jay told me that it is mathematically unlikely that we are ever to find our perfect match. Somehow he claimed that we are all more likely to win the lotto three times in a row. I found that hard to believe because I wondered how a mathematician could calculate such a thing. I believe that life is like a choose your own adventure book. There is a general outcome. If you want love to find you, you have to keep your eyes open.

My last love I was never really sure that they loved me back. I was positive I loved them because of how much it hurt when my affections were returned to me like unopened love letters marked return to sender. I am so sensitive that I was crushed by the two years until I decided that love was not for me. I’d see my friends happily paired off or getting engaged and find that I could barely fake the congratulations and the smile.                   

This behavior of mine made me feel guilty because I knew that I was happy for them… I just wanted to believe it could happen for me. At the rate I was going I felt like for sure I was never going to let anyone make me that vulnerable again. I am one moody hopeless romantic, so a few months after I swore off love, I felt it again, and I followed my own rules of chasing after it. Where this will lead me is an open book, a story yet to happen. It isn’t in love that I doubt, it is in people and that is just something I will have to work at.

Rule 2: Love is not always perfect. Love doesn’t always feel good. Love drives your level of patients and understanding. Don’t give up on love just because it gets hard. Love is personal and complex and even true love is something that takes a fair amount of forgiving and waiting around for.                 

Since I am in the group who hates love one day and loves it the next, I can’t choose the group that I think has the right idea about love and what exactly it is. What I really believe is that none of us have the answer. Cupid himself is running around shooting love arrows into people, so I think I will look elsewhere for advice.                              

Most people look to the movies to define love for them. Even though movies are projections of other people’s ideals, fantasies, and dreams. Movies are unnecessary middle men because they are created by people, but no one wants to go straight to the source.

            When it comes down to it, love is a feeling, and the world can try and tell you what that feeling is, but you only know that feeling when you feel it. Built off of past experiences, love is pretty much doomed from the start. Love is a battlefield where old loves come back to haunt the new love and try to destroy it.            

 

LOVE RULE 2: Don’t fear the people who will lie next to you and lay it all out on the line, make themselves vulnerable enough to reveal to you that they love you, even if it is just for that moment. Soak in their genuine words that no one ever lives long enough to hear their fill of.

           

LOVE RULE 3: It is important that when you feel love, you embrace it and chase it down. Live your life with no regrets even if the love is not returned, never leave it unsaid.                                                    

 

LOVE RULE 4: Fear the much larger group of destructive people that are often members of the love hater group. These people spend their time trying to destroy what is left of this world’s beauty. The ozone layer, our polar ice caps, and the air we breathe did not full their appetite to poison, to make the world rotten. Don’t let them turn you. Infect you into believing that if everyone isn’t happy, no one can be.                 

     Love just might be the only thing left helping this world stand and after the smoke clears, the fact that there are still some people strong enough to get back on their feet and continue to love, is a miracle.                                                                   

      Love has a way of acting like a guide or a road map. Exactly how many times have you heard, “follow your heart”? I believe that love is like a compass, and the moments that I held it in my arms or it brushed against my lips, I felt that I was right where I needed to be. I felt found and there was not a thing in the world that was going to tell me differently.                   

     People say many things about love, and I’ve heard many Christian people say, “God is love.” This saying makes sense to me because of the miracle it takes for two people to feel love, confess it to each other, and share in it unselfishly. If you really had to love someone else to make a new life, I think we would have a whole different kind of population problem.                                                         

      People fear love like they fear God. They’d rather never feel it for fear of how it would feel to lose it. As a consequence, I have observed many people who settle. They live superficial lives filled with superficial loves and wonder the whole time what’s missing.                           

      On the days I hate love, I can defend the love haters in their argument because love is such a dangerous drug that scientists have researched the medical explanation for perfectly healthy people dying after their spouses or from traumatic break-ups.                            

One of the most popular subject matters in literature is love and losing the will to live from a broken heart. This was referred to as acute emotional distress.           

Because it has always been the center piece of folklore or love songs it is hard to treat a broken heart as a serious medical condition, but it happens everyday.                               

      Dying from a broken heart is a phenomenon that links emotional stress with heart failure that is similar to a heart attack. This phenomenon is more common then you think, especially with women, because it is often mistaken as a traditional heart attack. The reasoning behind women being more susceptible to this condition is said by doctors to be related to differences between the way men and women’s brains are wired and hormones.                       

 

RULE 5: A broken heart can kill you, but you should never live your life without love. Don’t let fear control you.                           

      What would a life spent without love feel like? Would it be worse then death?

Today I am choosing to love love and as it is possible to die from a broken heart, there are just so many lengths that people will go through only for love and never for money. And today I hate love, there is a reason why they call us hopeless romantics.

 

Author's Note

the spacing as all messed up ignore that and grammar errors read for content