My naive ideal of love: Deeply connected, transcendent, magnetic, curious, passionate, generous, primal, quirky, childlike, warm, comfortable, eternal.
My own experience: Erratic, disrupting, consuming, often one-sided, ends painfully, muffled by reality, detail and minutia.
My observations in others: Fleeting, stagnates in time, looming cultural/societal pressures, asynchronous and unreasonable expectations, illusory highs, crippling lows, fundamentally imperfect.
Truth: Somewhere between all of the above, and whatever you make of it at the time.
There is certainly nothing that terrifies me more than intimacy. Such intensity and power comes with truly knowing a person. Even reflecting on mortality is less unsettling than to consider the depth of scar a broken heart can leave.
If I could avoid the experience going forward, I might consider it. I’m not sure it’s possible, however. This hopeless dance is so simply human, and to sit idle is to lament a prison of my own design.
Melodramatic? Oh yes. Genuinely so.
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