Loves

At one point in my life I used to believe in true love. I used to believe that God had put one person on this planet that was meant for you and only you.  And that life was a journey; all the things that happened to you in your life happened so that when you finally met your true love that both of you would be ready to begin a life together.

Those ideas I had about love were from a long, long, long, long time ago. Since then my views on love have changed, greatly. 

What I have learned about love is that there are many types of love. A quote that has stayed with me from Ken Burns, “There are many kinds of love: Joyous, zestful, desperate, the kind of love that is a gloomy, confused, dependency, never filled, therefore insatiable, a love that asks more of its object than it can give.”

I personally have lived and witnessed loves that were described in the quote above and others, loves that were parasitic, out of control, and mercurial at times, loves that were clandestine and never surfaced, ones that were overly devoted, suffocating, and unrelenting, loves that were stalled with no chance of growth, and even a few loves that seemed to be just right.

I am almost sure that almost everyone at some point in a long-lived life will experience many types of love in their life. What I have come to notice about people is that many people run away from love and sometimes choose to ignore it, hoping that at some point in the future that there will be something better out there for them. Or even disregard love, not seeing it as something important in their lives, therefore putting physical attributes, jobs, money, and other mundane things at the forefront of their lives. 

What I have come to understand is that love isn't what is truly important to most people, happiness is. Love can bring you happiness, but it can also bring you discomfort, jealousy, confusion, misery, and agony, the kind of agony that can cause you to lose your breath, that can hurt worse than daggers and inflict pain into your life that may never go away.

Just as it will never always be sunny, love will not always be blissful. In life you have to take the good with the bad and sometimes even the bad with the ugly. The things that are most special in life are the things that you work for, and love shouldn't be any different; the timing for love may not always be right, but more importantly, it’s what you do when the time comes. Real love takes work, understanding, patience, diligence, and sometimes even the offering of forgiveness.

I have never met a perfect person in my life; imperfections are sometimes the things that people love the most about a person. Short comings show that a person is human and shouldn't always be abhorred.

As you may know or should know if you ever want to be truly loved by someone in your life you will have to love yourself first and love the things about a person that you wish you could change. But remember, you're not perfect yourself.