♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Loving unconditionally is like purchasing an electronic devise without a warranty.  It’s like accepting the imperfections of a significant other and magnifying your own so that everything is bared – mood swings, bad hair days, warts ‘n all, body odours, predilections, annoying habits, quirks, mannerisms and the physical deterioration of age.

Loving unconditionally involves letting go of strict standards and embracing the absurdity of life and human nature.  It’s about accepting someone regardless of how you feel on any given day.  It’s like exposing your vulnerabilities and not giving a hoot what other people think about yourself and the object of your unconditional love.

Welcome to St Valentine’s Day.

Falling in love is like bungee jumping into a cloud of fluff and fun and a bluster of physical, carnal responses.  It’s like NO ONE has ever felt the way you are feeling before – because if they had, why hadn’t you known about it sooner. Falling in love is like being pushed to the precipice of a roller coaster, feeling your insides squirm, your erogenous zones twinkle with glee and believing that NO ONE has ever felt this way before!

Especially not your parents, because ewwwww.

Falling in love is like estrogen, testosterone and Love Hormone Number 1 have coated all your senses and suddenly you can see, hear and taste with amazing zing. NO ONE has ever felt like this, your body screams to you, and you believe it.

Falling in love is like breathing in rubber and expelling puffs of goo, but as long as your beloved is inside your space, you’ll be fine.  He/she is living with you.  For you. Seeping into you lungs and supporting you.  It’s like running around a revolving door and being so giddy you don’t know where to exit.  It’s like crying with joy for three days and forgetting a time when you didn’t want to cry for joy.  It’s like obsessing over every single cell in the human body and feeling as though your heart will spasm and implode with a combination of want, lust, longing, want, lust, love, immediacy, permanency, never-be-apart fanaticism.

Falling in love is crazy, manic, confusing, confronting, spontaneous, ridiculous and so rich, that if it could be bottled, the world would be a totally different place?  Maybe?

Welcome to Hearts and Flowers Day.

Falling out of love is like death.  The heart collapses, the body erodes, the memories decay.  Life continues around what’s left, but the victim of the cataclysm withers.  Cupid’s arrow is blunted and impaling.  It hurts like hate.

Welcome to life’s maelstrom.

Maintaining love over time is like applying moisturizer to skin that is threatening to dry.  You use your hands to glaze the balm over dermis marked with ingrown hair, tiny imperfections, burst capillaries, streeeeeeetch marks and deeply ingrained scars.  It helps.  It doesn’t erase.  It’s maintenance.

Maintaining love is like any work in progress – the tiny strokes you add to the canvas is an attempt to cultivate what’s already been painted.  The words you add to your novel, an extension of your story thus far.  The happiness, the confrontation, the climax, the problems, the outcomes, the character development, the journey. Is it a work limited by death?  Is is really about death do us part?

Maintaining love is like embarking on a challenging bushwalk.  There are free-wheeling down hills ahead, hidden creatures and scary things ready to surprise, delight, threaten.  There are (seemingly) impossible inclines to conquer.  There’s the anguish of feeling overwhelmed and (perhaps) there is the ‘sag wagon’ to fall into if we simply cannot go on.  There is an out, if we choose to take it.

Welcome to Single’s Awareness Day, Platonic Love Day, Lonely Hearts Day, Just Another Day, The Floral and Card Industry Boom Day.

Loving is a sublime life experience.  Loving is like stripping raw skin of flesh from your body and exposing your nerves to intense pain.  Loving can be kind.  Loving can be exciting, adventurous, horny, exotic.  Loving can kill you with  a cruelness bordering on self-flagellation.  Loving is there for the taking.  Or not. Loving shouldn’t define you, but it should enhance you.  Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t.  Take it by the teeth and taste it, but if it swallows bitter, remember that life should be sweet.  Love is life as surely as death doesn’t end it all.

And love is about more than just a single day of wine, roses and coupledom.

If you have seven minutes, this short movie is a beautiful way to spend them.  It’s called ‘Struck’.  It’s soundtrack will be familiar to many of you; it’s moving, poignant and quietly humourous.  (credit to Pauline, aka Poun, for posting it in her LJ a few months ago)

Struck