Yes, the big word. Though, in English it is not quite as big as in my native language (hm, maybe I should write something on the effects of languages some day too). English loves cucumber flowers and chips and kids and friends and spouses all with the same word. This is about love-love, not like, or enjoy or being amused.
We can't do it.
I don't know where it got lost, I can flip through memories of being totally and embarrassingly infatuated, head-over-heels in love, the whole butterfly madness. We used to have it. And now it's gone.
The best current hypothesis is that it got weeded out as a damaging behavior.
Romance? Damaging? Sounds odd at first. But if you look at it, romantic love is a pretty recent and artificial idea. It stems from the first novels of courtly love in the middle ages and evolved into this big myth, that now looks so real. The one perfect mate, who you will recognize the moment you meet and fall into undying love for the rest of your lives and beyond... sounds great, so effortless.
And that's exactly where things go so terribly wrong. Lasting love takes effort. On both sides. We're never perfect (not even people who don't come with a whole inner family along for the ride), we can never fulfill all of our partner's needs, there will always be misunderstandings, mismatches, annoying little quirks. Love, to us, is a willingness to work with the other person.
Somehow these high-flying feelings of the first falling in love get in the way of that. The pink glasses let everything look perfect and great and thus the resulting disappointments are all the greater once the soap bubble pops and reality sets in.
I don't know how we weeded out something that is so hard-coded into the body like the hormonal responses to meeting a new potential mate, but somehow we did it. Like we seemed to have buffered all extreme emotions.
It is safer this way, maybe awkward to others, but when I meet someone I can right away start at the work part of love and don't have to fight my way out of delusional clouds of hormone induced highs first.
And yet I miss it. I've been made after the change happened. I never felt this extremely in my whole existence. I know it's not good for us, I know it did us tremendous harm, falling for people who hurt us... and still I kinda miss it.
Is this how a drug addict feels after getting clean? Perfectly knowing it's a Real Bad Idea, but still secretly missing the high flights?
I actually don't even want to fall in love for real. I do have access to the memories of falling out of it too and it hurts way too. But maybe I could be allowed a daydream? Some safe fantasy just to play out what it would be like? In the clear knowledge that it's really just that, an illusion?
What I want for real is a relationship where all partners are willing to work on shaping our lives together. I was happy to be alone for a while, gave us inside time to rearrange things and get to terms with each other. By now it's relatively peaceful, few upheavals are so strong that they can't be dealt with on our own. There is room now in life for outside relationships too.
Finding someone when I thought I was alone was hard enough, but now we're all awake. It's gonna get "interesting".
