We have all been smitten. We have all experienced the pangs of a broken heart biting deep into the crevices of our crushed souls. We have all felt how it was waking up in a universe where the love of our lives, or shall I say ex love of our lives, are non-existent. For those who have not felt this, enjoy the moment now, for it will not last. Because you will, at some point in your life, fall in love – and possibly fall out of it.
We all have our notions of what love is, what it can and what it cannot be. It could be coming from our family and friends, what we have watched from movies or from TV, what we have read from fiction and non-fiction books, or simply from our own experiences.
# Love is not a romantic comedy nor is it a fairy tale with a happy endingAh, all those movies that fill your head with romantic scripts, grand gestures and dramatic tension. It’s all put in there to make the viewers feel good after watching it. Studios need to sell enough tickets in the cinemas to pay off their actors and actresses. They were written in such a way that they can tell a story that would normally have spanned 20 years, but will only be shown in the cinema for 90 minutes.
Love is much more than realizing in a split second that you have undying love for a best friend or a colleague. Or just because you are put in a situation where you need to quickly decide, you do not get into a ballroom full of dashing knights and charming princesses, and hope that you hit it off with someone just by staring at each other and dancing the whole night through.
Falling in love with a person usually happens in miniscule increments. You may not notice your feelings developing, but when you do, it feels like a bag of bricks to the head. And it’s not always as dramatic as movies make it out to be.
# You can choose to be in control, but sometimes, fate dictates otherwiseThere are so many times that we get into relationships and would have done everything and anything to make it last. But sometimes, things just don’t work out like we would have liked them to. We have limitations as to what we can control, and one of those limits would be the feelings of our partners who chose to leave us. We need to accept the things that are out of our control. After all, loving is a risk.
# Did you say easy?
Some people think that loving each other is the easiest thing to do. In serious relationships, it’s not a walk in the park. It will be a gruesome ring match with no referees. There is nothing easy in confining two individuals with two distinct backgrounds and traditions, and making them come up with their own combined recipe.
It will take time to get to know each other, it will take time to adjust to each other’s eccentricities, and it will take time to get accustomed to each other’s preferences. There is no shortcut or a doctor’s prescribed way of making a relationship work.
# Did you say forever? Even if you do get married, forever will only be possible if you get married once. With divorce and annulment within anybody’s grasp nowadays, you can get married five times if you can afford to do so.
We are not being cynical about marriage. Some marriages are the epitome of forever, they are just so luckily and hopelessly in love with each other that they do not even notice that 30 or 50 years have gone by. Your first serious relationship may not last forever, no matter how much you love your partner. After all, forever seems like a long way ahead. Focus on making things work now instead of filling your head with fantasies of forever.
# Work, work, work. Love needs work
In order for you to get to know your loved one, you will need to spend time talking, befriending their colleagues, getting to know their families, discovering what their preferences are. You cannot just sleep with a person for one night and miraculously know that he prefers his butter on top of the jam or that the first thing she does when she comes home is feed her fish.
If you have been in a relationship long enough for you to already know these things, you cannot rest on your laurels and be extremely comfortable with the relationship. You will still need to ignite that fire every once in a while, and remember that today is the day when she will deliver an important speech at work or today he will need his tux ironed for a formal night with his family. Sometimes, it’s the little things that will make the biggest differences and also the littlest things that need the most work.
# Love is always differentEach relationship is unique. Your relationship with your fiancé is not the same relationship that your mother had with her fiancé. As much as we want stories that we can relate to, we cannot even begin to compare our love lives with those of others.
Love can never be replicated, even if the individuals themselves are the same. If you have broken up with your first girlfriend 10 years ago and find yourself in a relationship with her again, only, you have both finished high school and now have stable jobs, the relationship will always start from scratch. You will have learned different things and matured separately. Never treat any kind of love the same way.