Day 212: Being In Love

I truly feel badly for anyone who has never been in love. I mean hopelessly, deeply, impossibly in love. So in love that you can’t think straight. So in love that your existence depends on the recognition of a significant other. So in love that you live and breathe solely to please that other. You devote all your energy and resources to making that other fulfilled and uplifted and beyond satisfied. I mean so in love that you willingly and readably make yourself completely and utterly vulnerable without any fear of any repercussions that could occur. I mean so in love that you walk lightly, think and speak freely, and engage in every possibility because you know that even if everything else in the world fails you, you still have the love of that person you hold in the highest regard, and that’s all that really matters to you anyway.

I know many people not only never experience such exultation, they never even get close. For whatever reason, they never even sniff love that’s offered up from another, love that holds no conditions or qualifications or limitations or barriers. Maybe it’s the fear of rejection that prevents one from making the leap into love. Maybe it’s simply that there’s no desire to even introduce love in one’s life.

Sadly, I know some people are pegged by others early on as being unworthy of love or unlovable or without merit to be loved, and even sadder, there are people who believe such characterizations and resign themselves to living solitary, lonely lives. It’s quite possible that living a life of never knowing the romantic love shared with another suits some people just fine. If you’ve ever been in love, though, you know what these people are missing.

The people I really feel for are those who so desperately want love, who so crave and yearn for it that they sell themselves out, and often to the lowest bidder. They make themselves too available. They go too far in their pursuit. In a perfect world, no one would be taken advantage of. No one would be stepped on and over and left to pick up whatever pieces might remain. But this is far from a perfect world.

Having been in love, I can’t think of a better gift that life can bestow than that of love. Meet the right person and no matter how brief the encounter is, being in love opens all kinds of doors that you can otherwise never peer into. Being in love makes possible all kind of emotions you’d otherwise never experience, including many that have no name or label. They don’t need names. They just affect. They just deal. They just develop and churn and extract and fill and mold and embrace and unite and conquer.

Having been in love, I can think of no greater pain and suffering that can come from something that can conversely be so full of potential and positivity. I can think of nothing that can harm and maim and devastate and destroy and crush and tear as deeply as love. I can think of nothing that can undo promise and expectations as quickly as love, that can rip holes in the fabric as severely as love. I can think of nothing that can drown one in such confusion and torment as remotely as a love gone bad can.

And yet, for every single negative aspect that love can induce, love is worth the risk, every time.