The evolution of love
Ah, that first big crush. Do you remember yours? A movie star, perhaps, or a kid in your class? A singer?
There had been a few before I turned 11 – George Harrison, of The Beatles was my favourite, there were a few cartoon characters and singers, but it was Michael J. Fox in his role as Alex P. Keaton in the tv sitcom Family Ties who had started my heart pounding in a different way…and then when I saw him as Marty Mcfly in Back to the Future (on August 14th, 1985), I was done for.
What a rush!
What a feeling!
What a guy!
There have been many crushes over the years, but Marty Mcfly is still up there on that list. He was cute, funny, awkward, very much the boy next door, was a musician, and had quite a series of adventures to make his way through. There are still so many qualities there that I admire and find attractive.
Our stories involving love have so many layers. We are those dumbstruck, flushed tweens, and those teenagers with our bodies out of control – where our growth never seemed to be in time – our noses and our eyebrows, our hair colour and texture changing, our limbs mastered by some unseen puppeteer – we never knew who would wake up to greet us in the mirror from one morning to the next. We dealt with acne, body hair, perspiration, body odour, for Pete’s sake, our teeth didn’t even seem to belong in the same mouth at times.
We made it through high school dances and notes passed in class, heartbreaks and crying on the school bathroom with friends, writing tiny graffiti in our school agendas, or in bathroom stalls, some took the bus and pined over older kids, or walked home from school and hoped to perhaps walk at least near the object of our affection.
We made it through leaving high school, whether that meant graduation or not. We went to prom or at least attended the aftergrad, and by that time we were all both slightly jaded and also often guarded the truth about our feelings towards others.
We made our way into
the world. We met other people, sometimes from other places, other
experiences.
We suddenly look at someone we’ve known for what feels like forever, and there is this little movement, a micro-wave in their body, and they
shift, and we feel the spark of a tiny surge, a whirring, a reminder, and
we fall in love again.
We made our way into the world. We met other people, sometimes from other places, other experiences. Sometimes we moved away, where we were able to shed our personas like uncomfortable skins that no longer (or never) fit. We met people who knew us as a clean slate to write upon, and we learned other ways to love and be loved. We occasionally became the object of another person’s crush, much to our surprise.
The awkwardness never completely disappeared, but occasionally a tad more confidence was at hand.
With the passage of time, we learned to love those around us differently, and ourselves too. Sometimes we had to prioritize ourselves, and love ourselves a little more, sometimes we realized love we felt for our families that was so different from when we dismissed it as kids. We learned to appreciate each other more.
We learned that there was hard work in love – and that sometimes relationships mean being able to work our way back to love when we can’t feel it as much on the surface. We learned that it still has its own power, and sometimes up it rises, from places we can’t reach – to remind us of feelings we have for others, whom we have perhaps been with for a very long time.
We suddenly look at someone we’ve known for what feels like forever, and there is this little movement, a microwave in their body, and they shift, and we feel the spark of a tiny surge, a whirring, a reminder, and we fall in love again.
We sit with each other through the hardest of times – through situations we never thought we would face. We see each other in vulnerable times where what holds the pieces together is all of the time that has been. All of the times we have experienced act as an adhesive so we can tell each other how fragile we feel, when we face challenges and hardship.
At weddings we often hear Corinthians quoted – and we are told that love is patient and kind, doesn’t boast, doesn’t dishonour, keeps no record of wrongs, and so on. There are times that I believe that may have been written by someone who had never been in a long-term relationship. Love can be very, very messy. It can feel offkilter and strange and sometimes a bit barren. Some could argue that that isn’t love then, but it is at times – it can be there in the strangest places, it can be summoned and surface all on its own in unwelcome, harsh conditions. It can soften or brace. It can be spicy, sweet, and sour all at once.
It can be agonizing, reciprocal or not, it can be totally impatient, unprepared, dusty, funky and can drop you clean onto your backside at times, and sometimes in the best of ways.
From the innocent days to the days when love exists on an old timeline, in old clocks that haven’t been wound in some time, in the echoes of school hallways that are layered with years and years and years of hearts of young folk busting at the seams.
It still is all around.
Here’s to feeling it, in the best of ways, here’s to reminders of what that feeling is, to letting it in, to exploring its return, to knowing it for decades, to knowing it even beyond this lifetime, and into the spaces where sometimes our loves go, where we can’t quite reach. Here’s to love beyond space and time, beyond joy and pain. Here’s to the mess, and the delightful alignment of it all.