True Love

"The truth is you'd run from real love if it ever came at you. Real love? What the fuck do you know about real love? and the neediness and the ugliness and the responsibility. You would fucking run and you know it. The only reason you stayed with me is because I was never really here!"

- Brenda Chenowith.

Being in love with someone, or rather, being truly in love with someone, I think, is not as common as you might believe. Think of the love you have for your family, your siblings; you have your heart in the palms of their hands just as they have theirs in yours, and you never signed up for it. Seeing them hurt means you're inadvertently hurt. Your happiness and theirs are essentially intertwined. Now, of course, this isn't an attempt to equate romantic love with the one we have for our blood relatives, after all, one is willingly entered into and the other is not. However, the common denominator among both kinds of love is they leave you vulnerable to the other person. You can't just walk away from them emotionally unscathed once real conflict rears its ugly head. Being in love with someone means being so immersed in their world, and a proper analogy of this would be like handing them a fully loaded gun and relinquishing your capacity for defense, trusting them not to pull the bloody trigger on you and also trusting them not to pull the trigger on themselves because not only can they hurt you with their actions against you, but seeing them get hurt leaves you hurt as well.

Yeah, we all claim to be in love with our beautiful and handsome course mate, with the next door neighbor, with the work colleague, and then out of nowhere it's over just as quickly as it had started, and then we're fixated on someone new. The truth, the real truth, just as the quote which preambles this piece says, is most of us would run from real love if it came at us. The neediness and the ugliness and the responsibility. It takes courage to let yourself fall in love with someone, for reasons already stated. Show me a guy who brags about his imperviousness to romantic love, and I'd show you a scared guy. It takes real courage to fall in love, and at this point, and even for the near future, I think I'd remain one of those scared guys.