Love Is Not For Sissies

I used to think that love was this blissful thing that made roses bloom and mountains move.... and then I fell in love. Love. This wickedly sweet tonic that makes fools of the most brazen men and reduces otherwise feminized women to sniveling piles of Bryan Adams songs. That’s right, I said it.

You know these people who are like, “my relationship is so peaceful and wonderful and we never fight?” Yea, I never met them either, and in fact I am thinking that they don’t really exist at all. So what makes me an expert? Nearly nine years of a relationship where I have been in love. Deep love. The kind of love so good I can’t leave, even when I desperately want to...

And trust me, both my husband and I have both wanted “out” at one time or another, just thankfully, or fatefully (your choice), not at the same time. THAT’S love.

Love’s a little vixen that lights up your lady parts and then again reminds you why it’s called getting screwed. Love hurts so good. Am I right? Not all the time, just sometimes and generally at the times you least expect it to. But you stay. Why? And why in the world would anyone in their right mind get married?

The answer is simple: we don’t like sharing. When you love someone you want them to yourself (unless you’re Mormon and polygamist, and we aren’t tackling that today, so step aside!), so you marry them to lock down and so you're tied together for your earthly existence. You don’t anticipate torturing one another or inadvertently pissing off the one you love, but it will happen. Over and over and over again. That is love.

Love is passion and fervor and all the things that we love and hate inhaled into one breath until you can’t tell the difference... hence, all that talk about fine lines. And it makes sense when you think about people who loved each other so passionately who totally hate one another now. Or when you see two people who supposedly hate one another and then all of sudden they are having sex. Go figure. Fine line.

It’s all a lot to do about why Friar Lawrence tells Romeo and Juliet to love “moderately,” right? Because fire and powder, as they kiss, consume one another. “The sweetest honey is loathsome in it’s own deliciousness”--and it is. But can you extinguish your own love by using it up? This is the question I ask myself with each passing fight my husband and I have. This is question I have about love.

Should it be tempered with anything... should we love so passionately that we know no bounds? Should love be moderate? What in the heck is moderate love, anyway? This I don’t know. What I know if that after nearly nine years, I still love with perhaps more spark than was originally present. And I can’t stop. And I am still annoyed, despite myself. And because of him.

That is love. I might as well face it, I’m addicted to love.