Every Love Story Ends With Two Lovers Cuddling Into Ever-After Bliss

I am captivated by how people in love just sort of mesh together. You see them walking down the street and they somehow look the same, and they dress the same, and they didn’t even try.  And they don’t notice but they are walking in step and they are leaning into each other, and even if they aren’t holding hands, their fingers keep brushing.  And when you talk to a couple, you can tell the second you meet them that they are together, because they laugh at the same time and they talk similarly.  And it isn’t because they are trying to copy one another, they are just so perfectly fit that they sort of put the good parts of themselves together to make one big, happy two headed person.

I like that.

I like looking at people in love.

Real love is this magical, warm nest that you build with someone else.

It is this safe harbor for two people.

I think real love makes you a better person.  You become less bitter, less cynical, more open.  

My friends who are in real love are so much better to be around.  At the same time, being with a couple in real love is both scary and enticing.  I like absorbing the warmth that radiates from them, but it feels like the warmth is not mine to absorb.  Like I am witnessing some private/public moment that I am not meant to see.  

Real love makes every glance feel private and special.  I like that, but I secretly feel like I should look away to give them those moments.  I don’t want to intrude, I just want to absorb and it makes me feel guilty and lonely.  

I ask my friends in real love how they do it? How does it feel? And they shake their heads, and shrug their shoulders, and I am disappointed that they never really have a good answer for me.  I love hearing love stories.  It leaves me hopeful and warm, after hearing and living so many miserable breakup tales.  I hate when love goes wrong.  It is so sad how twisted things can get.  How something sweet and pure can turn dark and sour so quickly.  You make yourself vulnerable, you put everything on the line, and they still choose to leave.  And you are left to absorb that knife in the chest.  Or you trust and they take it and run with it, and you have to adjust to the floor being pulled out from under you.  

It is sad that so often the people who loved you and knew you best are the ones that end up leaving or cutting you out of their lives because it is too painful, and you end up losing good people.  The other side of love is that breathless on the floor at 4 AM, yelling, smashing things, crying, I need you feeling, like you are some heroin addict that has somehow forgotten that you have spent the majority of your life surviving without them, and that you will learn to survive again.  It is so easy to lose yourself in that rush of adrenaline, and just leave yourself forgotten.  

Sometimes you end up losing more than you get for love. Love should never be backbreaking, it shouldn’t be one-sided, it shouldn’t leave you miserable and lost and empty.  That isn’t love. It takes a long time to understand this, I think.  

Wrong love is toxic and miserably addictive at the same time.  Nobody understands how isolating it can become, how you never really know what goes on behind closed doors or before the party, or after until you have lived it.  I want to plug my ears and scream NO and shake my head whenever that happens.  Maybe it is immature.  I think I delude myself into thinking that all love is perfect.  I refuse to shut down, and close off, and become dark and cynical about love.  There are too many beautiful things in the world, and too many beautiful stories and people to do that.  I have to keep hoping, however delusional.  I would rather that than the dark misery that is hopelessness.  I want to believe that every love story ends with the two people cuddling into ever-after bliss.