Love is a mystery to me...

Love is a mystery to me; do we love to be loved back? Do we love so that breathing is easier? Is loving a natural event for everyone or only those special selective few we see in the movies?

Loving seems obvious when you witness it but is it?  Do we really understand why people cling together in emotional attachment?  And more importantly, do we really know what love feels like when we do have it? Is it too ethereal for us to feel and touch like the brush of a light wind across your cheek?

It’s difficult to love someone with all of his or her “personality” and uniqueness (and we all have our own specialness that may make us more difficult to love.) We can clearly become infatuated with someone for a variety of reasons but when that infatuation fades, what is left?  Is that love or do we merely cling together because we need to be needed?

I believe that love and need are inseparable and, in fact, may drive many a relationship together or apart; some of your needs have to match, even if nothing else does. 

A bad relationship is like a bad hairdo; it may look fine on someone else; it may only look good when someone else does it for you but when left to your own devices, you just cannot make it look the same and so you are left with a broken smile that’s hard to fix.

Relationships and love are a lot of work.  There are no easy, natural relationships.  Human beings are difficult, self centered, and damaged from years of wear and tear.  They have secret desires they never tell anyone but themselves for fear of being too vulnerable; too exposed; too open.

I know that I want an honest relationship; one that is exposed, vulnerable and dangerous, yes dangerous because once you open that secret door to yourself, it can never be closed.

I have learned something very important, that loving yourself is the key to a successful relationship.  It is the primary reason most people cannot thrive in a relationship.  Did anyone ever teach you how to love yourself first? I wasn’t taught this and it has taken me a lifetime to discover.

If you don’t give yourself the real opportunity to love yourself as you are then you are missing the most important opportunity for love in your life; accept yourself, express joy in who you are (stop worrying about who or what you aren’t); at least take off your mask and expose yourself to you and realize that you’re not so bad; that you deserve to be loved; that you are not an imposition on life and others.  Everyone will not love you, in fact few people really do but let those that try to love you see the real you, warts and all and just maybe you’ll find love in cinemascope.