Falling in love is a good news-bad news story. You have to feel bad before you feel good. Once you feel good, you have to worry and get gripped with suspicion and jealousy. You endure it all because what's the option? Emptiness? Falling in love and its passion and desire is forever just up ahead teasing you and your beloved with immortality.
So how do you get to despair? Everything seems to be going just fine--then it's not? Unlike falling in love, despair is a slow process. The day-to-day world is a time filled with routine, responsibilities and disappointments--the continual need to adjust expectations to the situation at hand. Being in love creates a different time. When new possibilities emerge and undiscovered paths open up that never could in the day-to-day world.
While this world is filled with obligations to others, rewarding and desired as many are; by necessity these obligations repeatedly flow against your own needs and desires. Over time, the everyday world can become dark and you weary. Your own desires and dreams are uncomfortably crouched in an isolated corner of your mind waiting to be found.
This is why teenagers easily fall in love. Though this angst threads itself throughout your life, it's keenly felt in adolescence when your place in the world is yet to be found. You can feel it again as an adult after the wave of life's success washes over you; having built relationships, or family, or career. Where the tide recedes and you examine what is left to be done. It's at these moments you're open to falling in love. You begin to see how much has been left behind, undone, or wrecked upon those uncovered shores. Falling in love allows for those desires and dreams to awaken and take hold.
What was awakened in you when you last fell in love?
