We grow up with this beautiful, whimsical idea of everlasting love. A love so extraordinary that it seems to exist outside the ordinary conditions of life. The kind that smooths the jagged intricacies of life’s trials and tribulations into something worth it, if it means you’ll find “the one”. The idea of eternal love makes us believe that somewhere among the billions of people in the world, there is just one person capable of making us feel something we’ve never felt before. And when we find them, we’re supposed to hold on forever.
I love the idea of eternal love as much as the next person, but I think it takes away from all the loves that don’t last. With everyone chasing the idea of ‘one true love’ the other loves tend to be thrown away, or not deemed as ‘love’ at all.
The other day I was watching Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Sure, I turned it on because Javier Bardem is such a turn-on, but I was delighted with what the movie came to mean to me.
It embodies the idea that two people can love each other tremendously without having to sustain a relationship. That not all loves will last forever, and in fact, some of the best one’s don’t. María Elena and Juan Antonio’s love is both genuine and impossible. They’re passionately in love, yet incapable of being together without destroying one another.
Several other love stories are happening simultaneously, each meeting their own ends in varying ways, but that’s what I think is the best part. The couples’ inability to remain together doesn’t make their affection any less convincing. Actually, it’s the impossibility that seems to be part of what makes it so romantic, and so realistic.
To me, love isn’t defined by time, but by feeling. This indescribable, inexplicable spark I feel with another. No matter how hard I try I cannot find the words. But still I revel in it. I let myself be swallowed into the sweet surreality of this undefinable feeling, and I want it 1000 times over. But so often I see this extraordinary feeling being warped into an expectation of more, which I think denies so much of the intoxicating mystery that it offers. Instead of falling in love with the tangible now, some fall for an illusory future.
When love enters our lives, it can color the present with such vibrancy that its spillage makes even the distant future look bright. That future suddenly appears more attainable, and even more deserving of our optimism. We begin imagining entire lives with someone we’ve only just begun to know. Then instead of falling in love with the tangible now, some fall for that illusory future. But maybe that craving for love to last comes from society’s judgement of love that doesn’t.
Our only test of true love is eternity. If two people stay together, we celebrate their love as real. But if they separate, no matter the complexities or circumstance of their relationship, we’re questioning whether they were ever really in love at all. I hear it from my friends all the time. The person they spent loving for years is now considered a mistake, a lesson, or what I consider the worst of all: a waste of time.
Relationships end, but that doesn’t negate the truth in the love that was felt. It doesn’t erase the feelings or the memories. It doesn’t take away what happened between two people. All those things are as wondrous as they were, even if they couldn’t be sustained.
Love isn’t a competition in which each successive relationship must be better than the last. I can believe that I loved someone completely at twenty and still believe that I’ll experience something entirely different, and probably even more extraordinary, at thirty. And no matter how many times I fall in love in between, I’d like to believe that none of them will outweigh another in validity.
Some loves become friendships. Some become marriages. Others become memories of a person we once knew deeply but now consider a stranger. And I don’t think any one of these outcomes makes the original feeling more or less real.
This isn’t to say that I think everyone should experience a thousand romances. I do also think that there’s something beautiful about finding a person with whom love continues to evolve over decades. I admire the intimacy that comes from knowing someone through different versions of themselves, but I don’t think that experience should be the only acceptable definition of romantic success. I know that it isn’t mine.
There are people who will love once, people who will love a handful of times, and people who will fall in love so frequently that their lives become an extensive collection of extraordinary encounters. I don’t see why any one of these lives should be considered inherently more meaningful than the others.
What I object to is the idea that love must last forever to qualify as true love. It’s an impossible expectation to place on something whose magic comes, in my opinion, from its uncertainty. I want to fall in love 1000 times. Sure, some loves surpass the last in intensity, but never in validity.
Without the pressure or expectation or forever, love becomes simple, and probably more prevalent too. I’ll love the people who introduce me to unfamiliar parts of the world, who challenge the ways I think, who make ordinary afternoons feel inexplicably interesting. I’ll fall in loves that last mere hours, or maybe even decades. I’ll experience the different ways affection can manifest itself, and the different versions of myself that emerge in its presence. In each of these instances, I’ll appreciate the inexplicable feeling without insisting it lasts my lifetime. And if(when) it ends, I want to be able to look back on it knowing that the love was true.
And if I’m fortunate enough to fall in love a thousand times, I hope I’ll have the good sense to believe each one was true.