Stop Making Love So Easy

I don’t want an easy love, and I don’t want to be easy to love. Not in the most basic sense of the word, anyway.

That’s not to say that I don’t believe in love, or that I want a tumultuous, fiery love full of fighting and other antics, because I don’t. It’s actually quite the opposite. Too many modern relationships revolve around stability and comfort and not enough around joy and honor. A partnership should excite your heart with each passing day together, not simply be there for you to fall back on in times of need, when the job doesn’t work out or when life brings you down. It’s wonderful to have someone to lean on, but that logical side of things can’t be the basis.

We have a lot of different loves in our lives, and most people do experience the easy, tender kind once or twice. It can be healing to love in an easy way, and to be loved simply in return. Each decision is made carefully and discussed, each disagreement is frightening and quickly smoothed over, patted softly on the head and put to rest. But does it ever really feel right to be loved like this, like strangers? To be treated so gently, and to have your flaws and rough edges so politely avoided?

I don’t want someone to skillfully accept my bad days and my complexities without thought. I want someone who is affected by these details, someone who acknowledges every idiosyncrasy so fully that we are both bettered because of it.

I don’t want to sleep warm and cozy next to each other, because that reduces each partner to nothing but a warm body. I want to touch feet under covers and feel hot discomfort, to never quite find the right place for limb to stack against bony limb, to wake up each morning still bashfully breathing morning breath and to hope the other person doesn’t notice.

I want a love that is messy, that doesn’t always quite fit, because that type of love makes you constantly aware of the other person’s presence and appreciate it that much more. When did we become so selfish to assume that love will always be there? When did love begin to lose its mystery and replace it with logic?

Love means basking in the wonder of this completely distinct, separate human being choosing to live life with you. It means never losing that distinction, and constantly saying quiet thanks for the fascinating other being orbiting your own world. It’s the loss of that distinction that makes couples devalue one another, because we start to see the other person as simply an extension of ourselves. We reduce that other person to a title, a boyfriend or girlfriend, a husband or wife.

Be honest with yourself in deciding if your love is magical or if it’s simply comfortable. We all, as humans, deserve that. Stop making love so easy.