I have often heard that when you meet someone and you feel butterflies in your stomach, you should run. The stories I read and the movies I watched said otherwise. They taught me that when you finally meet the one, a sensation of nerves and goosebumps set upon you. They carve their way into your heart and head, whether you want them or not. There was always a sense of danger, something to lose, someone who would stand in the way of said love.
I learned not long ago that the idea of love that was programmed into my psyche was in fact quite unhealthy. Love was meant to be… peaceful? There need not be danger involved, the fate of the world would not depend on who my heart beat for.
How… boring. How mundane. How uninspiring. Where was the passion Nizar Qabbani wrote about? Where was the beautiful catastrophe of Shakespeare’s most memorable story? Perhaps the greatest tragedy isn’t that Romeo and Juliet died for love, perhaps it was that they fell in love to begin with.
Taking a look at my previous relationships, I had often opted for unrequited love or complicated love. To me, the thrill of the complication was more important than how I was being treated or how I felt at the end of the day. As I put those days behind me now—I now know what I deserve—I cannot help but search for what it means to have a healthy stable relationship yet yearn for the excitement of a complicated love.
I recently read an article by Harling Ross titled, I Didn’t Realize Love was Supposed to be Kind of Boring, that gave me a bit of a breakthrough to what I’m feeling. She talks about her experience with love and the understanding of love she accumulated over the years. Bluntly, I think she concludes my take on mundane love, “That love, in its truest, steadiest, most rewarding form, is extraordinarily dull. That contrary to popular stereotypes and cinematic tropes, there’s nothing to overanalyze, nothing to second-guess, nothing to report, nothing to pursue or refuel.”
Perhaps my yearning for the complication was a means to feel reassurance in love and maybe that in itself stems from a completely different place. When love is exists, beyond the rocky introductions, beyond the complicated or uncomplicated love, maybe love just simply is and with time, that should be enough. We should not be afraid to try love even when we don’t feel butterflies at first sight. With that in mind, I cannot help but ask myself, how can I be open to that kind of love—the calm, unproblematic, mundane
love?
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