Invincible - love from my point of view

I hate romantic movies with sad endings.

I guess I should clarify what I mean by "sad". I'm not talking The Notebook, where they die in each other's arms, I'm talking La La Land. (Controversial, I know.) Or Me Before You. Every time I watch one of these movies, it's like, "really? Of all the beautiful stories about romance you could've chosen to use your immense cinematic budget and resources to tell, you pick this one?!" It's a travesty, really. In my opinion, a complete waste of time.

I don't want to suffer through the inevitable blunders, miscommunications, and possibly painful moments in a romantic film only to get to the end and find out the couple did not end up together, especially when it's about dumb stuff that could be solved in a conversation if both participants were willing to figure it out.

Because what, I ask you, is even the point of telling those stories, if not to help us to believe that in the end, if it's strong and true, love can conquer the unbeatable odds?

Over my 21 years of living I have been very blessed to know many kinds of love -- familial love, strong love for close friends, romantic love. You could say I'm fascinated by love and all its iterations. At any rate, I'm certain that of all our basic human needs, the need to be loved is the one that has motivated much of my behavior as a child, into my adolescence, and even now as an adult. (Well, a little tiny baby adult.)

I've come to understand much of what really loving someone means for me personally, and what it doesn't. I want to paint you a picture of how I see it, particularly in the romantic sense, because wanna know a secret? I grew up in a house full of boys, and romance was sissy stuff. I think being in that environment made me kind of feel like my longing for romantic love was a silly thing, but now I know it's only human of me. Actually, I think it's one of the most beautiful parts of being alive and being human, really. And I want to write about it. So here we are.

I kinda look at it like this: true, lasting romantic love is made up of 2 inseparable parts. The first part is what I call "the soul mate factor", and it's the more cosmic, sappy, romance-movie element. You could call it attraction -- but it's a little more than that, because I am attracted to a wide variety of people, but I definitely wouldn't want to be in a committed relationship with everyone I've been attracted to. Attraction is a part of it, but it's not the whole.

No, this is chemistry. It's that indescribable something about someone that makes you want to be around them more than anyone else. It's that person you could talk to for hours and never get bored of. And this part of essential for me! I cannot skip it! It has to be there. It doesn't have to happen at first sight, but however it happens, at some point I have to acknowledge that my heart and my soul really feel at ease around this person. That's what I'm talking about. This is a sort of thing that's not always in my control -- I don't really think anyone decides who they're attracted to, let alone who they jive best with. This is the part of love that just sort of happens. On its own, it produces a crush. An attachment.

But there's a deeper element you have to have to make it to true love. It's the part you choose, and to me, this part is almost sacred.

It's a process of commitment, but it starts small. It's rooted in the connection you have and begins as a desire to influence the life of another person for good. This desire becomes your behavior and manifests as sacrifice.

It isn't easy. Ever. It's trading what feels comfortable for what helps them feel loved. It's saying what needs to be said even if it might hurt. It's doing what needs to be done. It's keeping promises always, no matter what, even when you don't feel like it. It's complete and total honesty, even when that honesty is terrifying and makes you feel vulnerable. It's remembering the important stuff and forgetting the stuff that doesn't matter, even if it's hard for you to let go. It's being willing to be inconvenienced for someone else's sake without making them feel like an inconvenience. It's opening up where you'd much rather stay shut, sometimes in order to dress wounds that will hurt less if you don't touch them but will heal much slower if they're not tended to. It is weighing the cost of pain against the cost of being without the other person, and deciding they're worth it. In this way, love is a choice, and a risky one at that.

Because if I decide to love you, I decide, of my own free will, to give you a part of myself. That's really what it is. It's only partially that cosmic, inexplicable likability between two people, and the rest is all the decision to be open, to be vulnerable, enough to let someone look at you and decide if they want you. And what if you don't want what I have to give? What if I want to give you all this love in my heart, but you don't want it?

The thing is, I'll never know and neither will you, unless I offer to let you see me as I am, for everything I am, the good and bad, the quirks, the tired and sad days as well as the excited and happy days. It's terrifying that I might share with you what scares me the most, and the deepest wounds in my soul, and how richly I feel things, and how overwhelming it can all be sometimes, and then you could say no. Truthfully, it's partially my fear of this that has kept me away from being truly in love with anyone. I think the most painful things I've experienced in life are moments when people have rejected parts of me that I've trusted them with. It's a scary thing to wager on, your heart.

It's supposed to test you, to stretch you, to make you wonder, maybe even make you cry. And you're supposed to feel all this and be willing to keep feeling it, you're supposed to work through it and come out on top together. True love isn't true unless it's experimented on by real life. True love will survive every experiment. No matter the test, true love will overcome.

How scary, yes. But what a miracle, too. It's power, and it's transformative, romantic love, or it can be. Imagine feeling so strongly about someone that it changes your life, it changes how you behave, it changes you. You become somebody different. Suddenly you're willing to do things you said you'd never do, or never thought of. You're willing to feel sadness and pain, because suddenly there's someone that makes you feel something else worth all those other feelings.

Historically, love has transformed princes and knights to beggars at the feet of their ladies. It makes poets and artists of people. It births beauty and music and so many words. It makes timid men bold, even if just for a moment. It turns cowards into warriors. 

At its deepest, for me, it makes me brave enough to do the hardest things I've ever done -- brave enough to let go, brave enough to forgive, brave enough to move on, brave enough to be kind, and brave enough to keep giving without worrying about myself. It's magic, it's powerful magic. It's true inspiration.

It seems incredible to me that one day, someone will feel that way about me. Truly, the idea that I could inspire anyone to acts of bravery and kindness and selflessness that they believed were beyond them gives me butterflies.

I have a lot of ideas about the person I'll end up with. I hope more than anything he's the kind of person it humbles you to know -- someone who can teach me that even though I have a lot of ideas about life, and love, and other important things, there's millions of different ways to see things. I hope he can show me how wrong I can be. I hope he puts me to shame. I hope he changes the way I look at everything.

It's this kind of love that I'm hoping for. I believe the kind of love that lasts is built around making a choice every day to be your best, truest, humblest self, and to care for the needs of another person to the best of your ability and beyond.

I've heard people say, "well, it's not realistic if everything works out! Not everything does!" And that's true. I'm not saying that if you were in a relationship that didn't work out, you didn't really love the person. There are a lot of different kinds of love, and a lot of different ways to love. I'm writing about eternal love, which I define as love that will last from this life into the next. But there are other loves that are only meant to last for a season. To those of you who have experienced this type of love, especially those of you who were striving for an eternal love that ultimately ended in heartache, I am so sorry. I can't imagine the pain of that experience.

But to Hollywood and sad chick flicks, I say, what is up with your portrayal of "true love"? I guess what I'm saying is, why focus on the stories about the seasonal loves when there are beautiful stories of love that transcended all sorts of barriers and overcame all obstacles?

"It's more realistic that things don't work out" is a depressing philosophy. I come from a tradition of stubborn, beautiful, transformative love; my dad's parents grew up together and were married over fifty years before my grandpa's death, and my mom's mom married the man whom she dated in high school (who also, coincidentally, introduced her to the Gospel), three months after both their spouses died within 48 hours of each other. These stories of love that crossed oceans, defied separation, and have now transcended even mortality give me hope that a similar love story is written in my Book of Life, a few (hopefully not too many) chapters ahead. I have no doubt that when I find it, and it's real, that there will be roadblocks, but that doesn't scare me nearly as much as it used to.

Because from what I've seen, true love is invincible.