Love ever surrounds us. We miss it simply because we do not acknowledge how much love already exists in our lives.
My Lovers,
This title is all-encompassing because it covers love present, past, and future. More than that, the inverse is also true, all the people that’d ever love me.
I was on the train when this inspiration struck. At first, I was working on a post with a similar idea but titled “Not everyone has to be the one.” This post was prompted by the question in my mind, how to receive love without romanticising it.
One of the most controversial issues around monogamy is its sustainability. If you are like me, you’d have at one point or the other asked yourself if it is possible to love one person for all eternity. I don’t think we get only one love story, rather, it is about the people we choose to have a love-life story with. As Esther Perel says, “there are people you’d have a love story with and the ones you have a life story with.”
In the quest for long term partnership, there is often a tendency to lump up all the existing dimensions of love by interpreting it singularly either by romanticizing it or sexualizing it, especially with people who do not fall neatly into the category of friends, family, or stranger.
In some relationships, this navigation is a whole lot simpler because our feelings are clear, there is no form of eros so we choose agape.
If you are also like me and are exposed to a lot of individuals, you’d have realized that elements that attract us to people stay the same regardless of gender. So, if you value honesty, you’d most likely instantly warm up to a person with a straightforward personality, the same is true for kindness and other values we consider priceless.
Again, you’d realize that there are various fashions of love and no matter how expansive your capacity for love, you cannot have a love life with everyone you become fond of or even choose to build a life with them regardless of the rationale.
Do you know how many beautiful people exist in the world? and if Kwei Armah’s title is anything to go by in the literal sense, then, “the beautiful ones are not yet born.” The saving grace is not everyone is we find attractive is attracted to us. Imagine a world where everyone was equally attracted to each other?
Mind you this post is not about the evasive effect of lust rather it is a soliloquy of a mindful observer on the extensive variation of love and all the narrowing misinterpretation that exists.
In recent times, I have felt love in different forms, a casual greeting turned into numerous displays of affection. So many mornings spent under a gentleman’s umbrella while he got wet (that was very humbling) the hugs I received without even knowing that was what I needed in the moment to feel better.
I think we favour a grandiose idea of love that we miss out on all these little chains of love. We become so consumed by the brand of love we seek that we miss all the unbranded designs. I don’t think the love we find unexpectedly is elevated than the one we ignore.
I like how someone in a conversation put it, “love is like a magnetic field so it gravitates towards you. ” Even then, how can we miss out on all the glimmers of love because it is not the one we were searching for or because it does not look like all the other pictures of love we see?
Is it better to have loved and lost or never to have loved at all? The better question is how can we ever lose in love?
Isn’t love what we make it? Yet in all the definitions we choose, this is true, love is kind, love is patient, does not keep record of wrongdoings. Love is hopeful and boisterous, it never fails, it is never lost. And when love is complete, there shall be no fear.
Yours truly,
Dcconnoisseur.
Connoisseur of Memories 