I’ve been thinking and feeling my way through so much inherited emotional bullshit lately. How finding pornography at such a young age has completely warped my notion of sex. How adolescent retreats to clandestine fist-humping helped me to escape intimacy and deal with the isolation I felt. Why playing catch with my father as a six year-old boy always ended with him telling me I throw like a girl. (He now coaches my thirteen year-old sister’s softball team. He also fully embraces me as a gay man.) How the only thing I wanted, ever, through all of this, was pure and unconditional love. Thankfully I’ve managed to survive my thirtysomething resentment with only a few scrapes and bruises.
But back to the actual act of contemplation: Why do we buy so easily into the grand myth of “true love”? Why is it the fabric for almost every story, the hope of every human being on the planet? True love is a mountain. It’s an ocean—of water, of time. It’s an abyss. Why the drama, people?! Is this message irresponsible? I believe everybody is entitled to true, unconditional love- I buy this part. I’m all-in. But my experiences have taught me that love does not come like the intense rush of a flood but, rather, like a (re)gifted houseplant, one that’s sort of wilting and yellow around the edges. It takes a certain giftee to look closer, to recognize the plant’s strong roots; to decipher its pleas for a larger container and a little more exposure; to fully recognize its willingness to thrive despite its environmental limitations and its dependence on another to give it more tenderness, more attention, more light, than its previous owner. It is a decision to accept and to care for something that possesses an extraordinary potential for beauty. It’s an opportunity to restore life. This is not unlike the unfurling of true love. And all in its presence feel immediately at home.
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