In the last 8 hours, I have talked to a divorced mother of 2 who turned lesbian, had lunch with a man who married twice, had a drink with a woman recently spurned and rejected by her husband, and got literally carried off my feet by a handsome gay man who got too excited talking to me about his holiday plans with his partner.
It made me wonder about love. Who's found it, who's lost it, and who is the happiest? Did the right way not worked out and the wrong way did?
When Jesus said "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends", he didn't try to be philosophical about love. Think of all the reasons for breakups and divorces and you'll only find a coward with a selfish motivation where love has failed to provide for the insatiable "how-can-i-be-fulfilled" appetite- finding a truer love, a better person, an ideal match, a higher feeling. Have they tried expanding their capacity to love, instead of changing their object of love whenever they hit a snag? Would finding that true love make love so easy and so unburdensome that you can skip your way to 'happy ever after'?
From the selfish coward to the unnecessary hero of love-"Unattainability" as C.S Lewis so eloquently put as the essential quality of love, the intense joy that lies in not having but desiring- celebrates the romantic masochist but had conveniently buried the rest who had their heart sick with deferred hope or hopelessness. Let us not forget that "unattainability" was also the same word that seduced Eve to disregard all that God has given but desire for what she could not have in the garden. Real love always hopes, always trusts and always perseveres.
Give me a real hero who will fight for his love in the real battlefield instead of the pseudo longsuffering romeo in his armchair.
Love is an act, a decision and a sacrifice. The others are best left in fairy tales and the cinema (and the bar that I've just walked out of).
