Forever Love...?

I found the inspiration for this blog in a question that was recently presented to me by a stranger through my facebook account. It is of the outmost interest to me to see how public networks such as facebook, myspace, and Friendster have positively incremented communication among people all over the planet, and, at the same time, have also killed the very same communication in many different ways by, for instance, cruelly cutting off the pleasure that a genuine and heartfelt phone call or even a written letter usually bring in a relationship (and not necessarily only a romantic one). I say this with a little nostalgia in my heart as, looking back to my recent romantic failures, I realize how I let facebook messaging play the role of protagonist in a lot of circumstances that should have been faced in a personal “I see you-you see me” contest instead. We breakup on facebook (and text messages, yuck!); we send love through facebook; we argue through facebook (without the capability to discern the facial expressions and tone that we relay to our written statements, double yuck!). But we also make unexpected and unpredictable friendships on facebook, and, sometimes, like in the case that I am going to elaborate in the following paragraph, we get confronted on subjects that slip out of our minds in the chaos of our daily, busy lives.

Today I was asked, “Do you truly believe in everlasting love? Because, hey, it does seem like much of a naive and idealistic point of view to entertain nowadays”. Wow. After my latest bitter, controversial, and heart-wrenching breakup (which by the way is as fresh as a few days ago), my first reaction to this question should have definitely read like this: “True love? What the hell are you talking about? There is no true love! True love is only in the movies, books, and songs. Now, get off facebook and go get real”. Ladies, was my answer the complete opposite than that declaration! And am I an incurable, hopeless, and terminal love believer… My answer was short and it read like this:

“I believe 100% in a kind of love that is everlasting, pure, and unequivocal. I believe that you can love someone for the rest of your life, despite the fact that this is an unpopular view in today's society. People change, you are right, that's why I think that you should seek real love once you have fully developed your personality and have matured to the person you will be forever. If you truly love someone, you will love that person for as long as you’ll populate this earth; unfortunately that kind of love may not be mutual, and that's where the trouble occurs...I have recently learned that you should give your heart to someone only after you have made sure that his/her ethical standards, compatibility and opinions in matters of love are the same. That's where we all go wrong. We start a relationship with someone knowing many times that they don't share our point of view on love and we wait for them to change their minds, but the truth of the matter is that they never will, regrettably. True and everlasting love is an extremely rare combination, but I DO believe it does indeed exist”.

I am feeling like much of a desperate case nowadays, just recently dumped by a man I would have donated one of my kidneys to in a blink of an eye (should the circumstance have occurred) and who, in the end, just didn’t care enough for me to compromise about our relationship’s expectations (no matter what weak excuse he put on the table for me to buy-which I didn’t buy, by the way, for not even a split second); yet I’m thinking that Mr. Right is still out there, I just haven’t met him yet. Recently I realized how many excuses we, as women, make for men, and I realized how sick and tired I am of these excuses as well. Please, raise your hand if you have found yourself in the situation where you liked/cared for a man so much that, no matter what, no matter when, no matter how, you’d have done anything in your power to keep the relationship together. Thank you ladies, that just means that you were truly into that guy to the point that nothing else mattered. Now, raise your hand again if you’ve ever been in the situation in which some excusable, minor event happened and, against your will, determined the end of your romance with Mr. Too-busy-to-be-with-you. Great, look at the hands going, nice. Please stop thinking that in this particular matter men and women are different; stop thinking that a guy can truly be too busy to call you, or date you; stop thinking that he’s still hurt because his ex hurt him and he’s become gun shy. Excuses, excuses, excuses.

There is love; there is one kind of love: everlasting, pure, and unequivocal. Everything else is rubbish. And, yes, even in today’s society we still have this kind of love, for as much as an unpopular, incomprehensible and hard to believe notion it may have become, and for as much as some 50% of marriages inevitably end up in divorce. I just think that many women today are not quite familiar with the kind of love I am talking about because they are settling for some lighter, surrogated version of the real thing, therefore making inexcusable excuses for all these knuckle heads out there that wish to have their cake and eat it too; the bad news is that “WE ARE LETTING THEM”. I hear so many times from my girlfriends (and many times I have heard it from myself too, regrettably) that something is better than nothing. REALLY??You mean the crumbs, the scraps and the residues of some dude who is not quite sure he actually really likes you are going to do for you? Nuh-uh. You know, if I saw it that way, if only I had such a deplorable amount of self esteem and respect for myself, I’d still be with my beloved ex boyfriend right now; I mean, I wouldn’t be longing for his face, for his touch, for his voice, for his scent, and for his bed as I am now as I write these words. I would not be torturing myself thinking he may be with some other woman at night; I would not feel that lacerating pain in my stomach I feel every time I realize I will never be with him again. But I said no, and so should you. He offered me some kind of plastic-y looking, uncolored, meaningless, and unscented box and he said that’s all he had for me right now, but that MAYBE later, if I were patient enough to wait for the wind to change, I could get the whole prize, at his discretion, at his own time, and at his convenience.

I said no. I grabbed that box and gave it back to him, not without pain, fear, and regrets, but I did it. And I am not even getting a refund on it, nothing, just the pain. Does this mean that there is not such a thing as everlasting love out there for me (and you) to discover? No, it just means that *he* didn’t have that kind of love inside himself. I have it, I treasure it and I want to give it to that man who truly deserves it, one day, after all the pain will be gone.

And so should you: own it, treasure it, and give it, when the time and gentleman will be right.