The short-lived
season of cherry-blossom pink, and seductive-red hearts is upon us—love as an
over sentimentalized commercial enterprise that, essentially, holds little to
sustain and nourish us.
I don’t mean to
be a downer here, in fact, I mean to uplift, but uplift in a grounded sense of
what it means to be in relationship, to love someone.
Relationship in
almost any guise is not a simple, easy undertaking. When we engage with others,
when we invest significant portions of our mental and emotional life in getting
to know someone better, ideally, we take on a deeper sense of responsibility
both for ourselves in terms of how we are treated by the other, and for the
other in terms of how our actions and behaviour play out in their life—part of
the work of love.
As we are all a
multi-faceted complex of moods, personality, degrees of intelligence,
understanding and skill, it isn’t a wonder that we come up against challenges
in our dealings with one another.
Love, therefore,
in the broadest, most real sense, must have substance to it. How else to manage
the discursive challenges when our friend or lover proves both to be much more
and much less than we imagined or hoped for?
Sticky sweet
sentimental notions of love and relationship may, temporarily, be stimulating,
but will never give us the strength and fortitude we need to manage this
dissonance well.
And, if we crave
the nourishment that can only come from depth of engagement and intimacy, best
plan on being awake, attentive and challenged, for a robust love is the only sort
of love that will see us through.
Be light-hearted
and heavy-hearted. Be happy and sad. A well-rounded love holds space for it
all, is present to it all and transcends (thankfully) the feebler, more
conventional notions of love that permeate this season of candy-coated I-heart-you.
Have fun, but be real.
Love well.
Love well.
