This is a blog about Love. No not mushy Love, or ‘The Notebook’ Love…in actuality it would be more accurate to say that this is a blog on peoples’ perceptions of love. I’m sure you’re thinking this blog has something to do with my recent relationship trouble, or was inspired by my new venture into the dating world but you would be wrong. The thing that triggered this blog, and this whole thought process, was Facebook. Yes, it’s true, in perusing people’s profiles and statuses I came to realize that many people have at some point asserted a similar idea: “I don’t believe in Love”. And the more I thought about it I realized ‘how many times had I heard someone young say that?’. Yes, I myself am guilty too. I once told my best friend should a certain event ever occur I didn’t know if I could believe in Love. So yes, I made the same party foul, so to speak, many of you have made and I am now here to dispel that silly attitude. I think many of us are driven to that phrase because we want to be cynics. Whether it’s to protect ourselves because we are afraid of being vulnerable, to hide the fact that we are very capable of caring a great deal, or simply because we have a fascination with that romanticized Byronic hero, something about cynicism draws us in. Some people may find that phrase to be the cure for their broken heart, and some adults may tell you it’s not that it doesn’t exist, ‘you’re just to young to know what it really is yet’. I have a response to all.
I feel sorry for Love because it gets stereotyped more than anything or anyone I have seen. Why is it that the connotation we cannot seem to get past is that Love=Lust? That it is that burning passion for the one you are supposed to spend the rest of your life with, that can’t be without you need? What we forget is that Love comes in many forms. True that is a form, that Love that only a man and a woman can understand, that take your breath away. But PEOPLE, that’s not the ONLY kind! If you haven’t found that type of Love yet, don’t worry, you have time, you’re young you don’t need it right now. Don’t give the rest of Love the shaft because if you do, not only are you not being fair to yourself, but how inconsiderate to the people in your life. We forget that there is familial love: the way we feel for our parents, the way you feel when your baby sister looks up at you for the first time and smiles. Of the love between friends: that lost track of time talking in the coffee shop, that you can call me at 4 in the morning and cry your eyes out, or the way your dog runs up to you the first time you come home from college. Or the love you unknowingly spread when you donate that twenty dollar bill to the Salvation Army at Christmas time. What makes us so misguided to think that there is only one kind of Love? We are not too young to know Love, just because our heart is broken does not mean we did not ever have that type of Love, or can never have it again, and no matter how “cynical” we are we cannot run from the Love of our families and friends.
For example, my Father once told my brother, sisters, and I that if our house ever caught on fire he wanted us to get out immediately, even if one of us was trapped, the others had to get out. His reasoning is he would rather lose one of us than all of us. It’s a very logical approach, but I should have insisted that we ask the same of him, because I think my Dad always knew deep down inside that he was asking the impossible, and he himself could never abide by that rule. It caused me to have a reoccurring nightmare in which I woke up in the middle of the night to my house burning down, I start to run down the stairs after my family who is safely outside, but hear my baby sister screaming, still trapped in her room. I turn back immediately and rush straight into her room, pull her out of her bunk bed as the ceiling is starting to cave. And it ends. Always there, I wake up and can only assume we made it out. The point of that startling dream that haunted me until I was about 16 is that I could never turn my back on a sibling, or in the macrocosm: anyone I loved, it is unthinkable. I would rather die with them than abandon them. And I think as you sit here reading this you know in your heart you would do the same. So if you “don’t believe Love exists”…what is that?
I was in a play my second semester of college called ‘Anna in the Tropics’ and in this play there is a quote from Tolstoy that I think more people need to take to heart. It goes: "If there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts." Think of all the billions of people there are in the world, think of all the different types of love that could be shared with them. Don’t sell yourself short and don’t disrespect them, you are young, there are so many types of Love to be had. Some day you’ll have that one heart two bodies kind of Love, but until then, calm down. So if you’re still playing that violin, and trying to keep up the façade of the Cynic, gotcha! I see right through you. And if your still insistent…go tell your little sister*….
*or equivalentJ
