Love conquers some but not all

Ah, the exquisite dance of eros and pathos. Love collapses boundaries and in that vulnerable state, I don't think it's easy or necessarily desirable to see, let alone accept ours and our partners less savoury qualities and attributes.

Love has many dimensions and many colours, it also has its shadows and dark nights. To deny these aspects invites acute disappointment; to embrace them demands strength.

Remember, fairy tales are dry cleaned of their original dark content and themes, therefore their legacy is dubious.

I'm sure our expectations of love are too high or rather are too conditional. Unconditional love is a nebulous concept for sure, and yet it is suggestive of a more balanced and indeed zen approach to life and loving.

I believe love can be a crucible of transformation but I doubt most of us are ready for that level of change. Integrating and accepting all that we are and all that they are deals the death blow to romantic ideals, yet how liberating to shrug off the various projections of damsels and knights living happily ever after.

In sum, I don't think love is the passive, gentle energy we so often assume and expect. It's a provocative power and one not to be underestimated.

[Oh yeah, our romantic ideal of love tells us love is a state, a plateau, a goal, or that it's a splendid garment we don that inevitably grows stained, faded, even tattered. It's more like music, a song we can learn that once learned is always there, singable but not always sung. It's when we ask for more than it can offer -- constantly top-of-the-charts-with-a-bullet-ing the song and wondering why the world hasn't changed forever -- that we become disillusioned. (It's hard to explain and I'm starting to wish I were a poet. Botheration!) Thank you, Lena. --fl]

..and what of love not being there at all?

Without the salt the soup becomes boring and eating becomes a chore.

[Exactly! I'm not saying you can live without love anymore than you can live without salt! Exactly! I'm just saying it's like singing "All you need is salt, la la la la-la-la, salt is all you need." It's an ingredient, not an end in itself. It's a spice, not a drug. Thank you, M. --fl]

Love is a very complex emotion, feeling, act. I am always asked why are you still single? like there is something wrong with me... but up until a few weeks ago I kept the reason hidden, kept it to myself. So as I don't have to feel or deal with the pain. It wasn't until I met a wonderful Englishman online (just as a friend) that I began to see and realise that there is more to life then just hiding and being alone. I want to feel again. I want to smile again....

Am I still single... you bet! But because I am dealing with my past, I know I can feel love again. And I want too... And I know it is hard work to keep the love alive...

I am tired of my soup with out the salt... and it took a few online friends (You included Fig) to help me to remember what all the fuss is about. Thank you!

[I'm so glad, Needra. Thank you. --fl]

Right said, Fig and Lena too. Transformative, easy, hard, silent, angry, gentle, fierce, all those things are in love and love is part of relationship, all and nothing.
Its good stuff and makes you work, sweat and grow if you approach it with eagerness, and an healthy dose of fear.

[Got that right! Put it this way in love-between-partners love, "making love" isn't what we do while we're having sex (though we can do it then too) it's what we're doing all the rest of the time. You really have to make it, renew it, build it, continuously. You can't just check it off a list of things you've got. If we don't it won't have been there in the first place. Thanks, Goose! --fl]

My response to you from my blog (*finally*), posted here, too:

"The flaw, if there is one, is *not* that love, romance, contact, sex are inadequate but that we expect more from it than it can possibly offer. Which is sort of unfair of us."

This is what I'm thinking, too. So how do we create a new, more truthful definition of what love is in the world, so our expectations are honest and people don' t feel they're *not* in a healthy relationship because it's *not* fairy-tale? Where are the limits? How much discomfort or misery in a relationship is too much? How much is okay?

I know these answers are all relative. But I've talked to friends whose parents had arranged marriages. What they've told their children love is is a far different animal than most people who married for romance ever expect. I always thought that arranged marriages as a concept was terrible. But I wonder if the practical applications they use to make those relationships *work* actually are. Can romance and pragmatism exist at together? I think it's possible. But we'd have to redefine both, and combine them together to create a new definition for love, too.

[The arranged-marrage thing is kind of interesting. They're evidently quite durable compared to other kinds, even when the couple moves to a more romance-based culture like, for instance, the U.S. or Canada. One theory is that arranged-marriage partners have fewer expectations and thus form more realistic, less-mutually-one-sided attachments. I don't know if that's it or if it's just a matter of us confusing fairy-tale romance and real-world love and finding the latter insufficiently cartoonish and uncrackably plastic as tales of the former lead us to believe. Thanks, Syl. --fl]

I actually think semi-arranged marriages (the kind where the parents do the arranging and both bride and groom get a real veto on the choice) are OK.

[I'd add the stipulations that as long as it's not treated as part of a transfer of property and as long as there's no participation in the virginity-as-a-commodity fetish imposed on any parties. Thanks, Lynn. --fl]

I was actually reading about why arranged marriages tend to work better, and among other things already mentioned they tend to have more support from their families. I think that's another thing that's missing in our concept of "love", we forget that it's not just about two people but also the community that they have to support them and help them through difficulties.

[Good point, Colette. Family/community support is a two-edged sword, of course. Sometimes they're there to give you the shirts off their backs, sometimes they just stone you to death or set you on fire if you want a divorce. That said, you're absolutely right that marriages are more stable and satisfying when they're integrated into larger communities. As Judith Martin / Miss Manners said "there's nothing two individuals can do with a marriage license that you can't do without -- weddings vows aren't promises to each other, they're promises you both make to your community." Whether joined by arrangement or romance, we disregard that at our peril. Thanks. --fl]

More family support, and more blatant family interference when things start breaking down :-). I knew someone with a troubled arranged marriage, and it turns out that the standard way to solve marriage problems in that culture is for both parties to approach their parents, and for the parents to get involved in negotiating between their children. And absolutely everyone in the extended family has and expresses an opinion on the marriage problem :-). In this case, the extended families were also at odds, so it wasn't working very well, but I was told that the approach of using parents as mediators often actually worked.

[Oh yeah, mediation of any kind works wonders but you're right that it *really* helps if the mediators aren't working at cross purposes. Thanks, Lynn. --fl]