“Unless it’s mad, passionate, extraordinary love, it’s a waste of your time. There are too many mediocre things in life. Love shouldn’t be one of them.” — Unknown
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I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships lately. I’ve found they tend to be simple at their core, but we complicate matters when we’re in them.
We’ve all experienced friends who tell us complicated stories about things that are not right in their relationships, but in the same breath, they tell us how devastatingly in love they are with their partner.
But, in the next breath, they tell us they’re not sure they’re meant to be together forever. They tell us that though they love the person so much, they sometimes worry. They question their feelings. They tell us story after story, some of which leave us believing that they’re meant to be, and several that leave us questioning why they ever got together in the first place.
When we recount these stories, we tend to think they’re simple. We tell others that they met at the wrong time or they’re just not right for each other at this very moment. Perhaps, some day in the future, they’ll become the right people for one another. Just not now.
We tell people that they’re just too different, and from our perspective, this seems to be very clear. We can see where things unravel, why their fights last until dawn breaks and why each person is just too tired to keep things going. Despite this perceived clarity, we watch them try. We see them struggle, fight after fight, with each tear as a painful reminder of another.
The lyrics of one of Billie Holiday’s most famous song offers an explanation that many have come to accept: “All who love are blind… smoke gets in your eyes.”
But is the intensity of love really creating a smoke of emotion that clouds our perception of the truth? We think the truth is there, and present each time we have that same fight. It’s there each time we cry those hopeless tears. It’s there each time we go to sleep angry, unsure of whether we’ll ever really find a resolution. Our feelings for the other person and the good times that we can’t get out of our heads complicate the situation.
These memories become the gel that keeps us glued to the person we fought so hard to keep. Time after time, we think we see the truth — that we weren’t meant to be — and it eats at us.
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Like drowning sailors desperate to stay afloat, we cast line after line, hoping that one of them will finally catch. We’re in love. We’ve never felt this way before about anyone. When push comes to shove and the relationship comes to a breaking point, we miss the other person with an intensity of emotion we never knew existed.
We are desperate and we are lost. Pain like this shouldn’t be experienced, we think to ourselves. Pain like this is unreal. In the words of Jeanette Winterson, “Why is the measure of love loss?”
I don’t think we realize is what the truth really is and what it has been this entire time. The truth is that the world has never been perfect and it never will be. The truth is that although we think things will always work out how we want, if we just try hard enough, it simply isn’t true.
The world can be inexplicably brutal at times, and without reason. An idea I think many idealistic minds were raised to believe is that if you do your very best, the world will treat you fairly. Our struggle to maintain that belief is what keeps us in this constant struggle for perfection. With that constant struggle and that belief comes inevitable disappointment and frustration. Much of our pain and disillusionment comes from that very expectation. Two unique, beautiful and intelligent people, who have very different ideals and ideas about how their lives will turn out have a very small chance of agreeing on everything in life.
We don’t spend enough time thinking about what a miracle it is when you find someone to love. It is a greater miracle indeed, when the person your heart desires wants you back just as fervently.
I recall how difficult it was to find someone who made me feel like I finally found the person I’d been searching for. When that person fell in love with me, I remember thinking about how lucky I was to be with the one I dreamed about at night.
The probability of one person’s affections being matched by another was, in my opinion, infinitesimal, and I genuinely felt like the stars had suddenly aligned. I was pretty damn lucky, I thought, and I wasn’t about to let that luck get away from me.
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You know that feeling you get when you wake up on a Sunday morning next to the love of your life, and you smile simply because you’re so happy that he or she is next to you? That feeling you get when you’re dancing with someone in your living room and you feel like you could die in his or her arms as the happiest person on the planet? That doesn’t come around very often.
In fact, I’d venture to say that it might only happen once or twice in a lifetime.
I’ve found that many tend to take love for granted. One too many disagreements, and they tell themselves that they’ll just hop back on OkCupid and find another love of their life. What I don’t think we spend enough time thinking about is the fact that our life on this earth is very short.
Life will never be perfect, and it won’t always play out how we would expect. We can’t control what happens to us, but we can make the best of what we’re given.
And, in this imperfect world, the greatest thing we can do is live lives that may not be perfect, but are passionate. When you find a love that feels like the best thing you’ve ever had, makes your life feel like a perpetual romantic movie with an indie soundtrack and leads you to pinch yourself because you can’t believe your luck, hold onto it with everything you have.
I know that when I leave this earth, I would rather have died trying to live my life as a beautiful mess, rather than simply as an acceptable expectation.
“Unless it’s mad, passionate, extraordinary love, it’s a waste of your time. There are too many mediocre things in life. Love shouldn’t be one of them.” — Unknown
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Originally published on Elite Daily
Author: Michelle Hu Michelle graduated with a double major in Communications and Sociology from UC Santa Barbara. When she is not writing, she can be found traveling, hiking, taking pictures and drinking way too much fancy coffee.
Photo: Pedro Ribeiro Simões / Flickr