![]() ![]() This cannot be done without arriving at a personal definition of love that we live up to and into. To look for the love of one’s life, she observes, requires an understanding of and a commitment to what it takes - the immensity it takes - to love someone for a lifetime. It is so very important to know what you want from a relationship but you also have to create space for a relationship to develop without worrying about what the relationship will or won’t become. When you meet someone and start dating, you have no idea where things will lead…. You can work hard to make a relationship work and have the best of intentions and still, things might not work out but that doesn’t mean you have wasted your time or failed. You never really know if a marriage or relationship will last a lifetime. Having “lived and loved long enough to recognize that there is a difference between the idea of love and the reality of love,” she adds: But when love is true, you embrace all the unknowns, regardless. You may never know if you have made the right choice. The truth about love is that it is often bewildering and unknowable. We are told from an early age that our true love is out there, waiting for us and so we yearn to find them, to know what it feels like to experience true love, to know you have made the right choice. We live in a culture that idealizes the idea of love, and the idea that there is one true person who will complete you, fulfill all your dreams and love you forever. Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward toĪ century and a half after Jane Welsh Carlyle reckoned so brilliantly with the difference between loving and being in love, an exasperated 43-year-old reader turns to Roxane with the same perplexity, signing herself Where the hell is the love of my life? With an eye to the tyrannical myth of “the one,” Roxane responds: How to bridge the abyss and see clearly through all the confusion is what Roxane Gay explores in one of the pieces collected in Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business ( public library - her astute commentary on popular culture and politics, punctuated by reflections on the deepest and most timeless strata of our experience. We fumble and fall again and again into the treacherous abyss between the idea of love - an idea baggaged with millennia of cultural mythologies - and the reality of love, with all its work and responsibility. We mistake much for love - admiration, attraction, need. “Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility,” Baldwin cautioned a generation later as he himself reckoned with the work of love.īecause the stakes are so high, because we are so overwhelmed by both the power and the fragility of love, we regularly find ourselves catatonic with confusion about what it all means and what it asks of us. “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to the young poet seeking his advice a century ago. ![]()
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