Why love is

The real key to making any relationship work, is finding a balance between the two of you. It comes down to knowing when to stand up for what you want, and when to back down and compromise. Someone once told me that love is nothing more than how much of your significant other’s bullshit you can put up with. I think that, while this may play a part in it, it is not the sum whole of love. As said in previous posts and will say again here, Love Is.

All too often, people try to quantify love, to put it in a nice neat package. The problem is, love doesn’t fit in a nice neat package. Love is messy, icky, scattered, disorganized and constantly changing. This is the pure beauty of love and why it is so hard for people to really find love these days. Some web sites will have you believe that they can find you love based on a bunch of neat little questions. I took one of those matching quizzes one night just out of curiosity (and sheer boredom) and honestly feel that, while matching you up with someone who will be able to cohabitate with you, I don’t think that they really get into the messy sticky parts that make a relationship into love. Sure, you can put up with the fact that I like to keep my office clean but cluttered, but are you into kinky sex? Am I for that matter? The thing is, no matter what some head shrinker tells you, you need to find that love for yourself and find that person who’s likes and dislikes can fit into yours.

Love is like a puzzle. Of course, in this puzzle, there are only 2 pieces, and there is the option to reshape the pieces a little. Five a little here, take a little there and suddenly you have a great fit for the next little bit of time until the shape of the puzzle changes.

A true relationship does that, it changes and adapts over time. You get two people who enjoy running together every day. Life is great and their puzzle works well and fits nicely. Suddenly, one day one of them is hit by a drunk driver on the way home form work and can never walk again. The puzzle just changed. They can no longer share that run each day. The ting is, this does not need to mean an end o the relationship, just a change in it. The key to big challenges like this is not to focus on what has been lost, but to focus on what you still have. You still have someone who loves you and cares about you, but if you let the fact that you can’t walk or run anymore weigh so heavily on you that you turn away from life, you will loose that. To use the key, you focus on what you have. Sure you can’t run, but let’s say you are in a wheelchair and have full use of the upper body, then with some work, you can get back out there again and wheel along right beside your other half.

Too many times, we see people who loose something and cannot see past that. They need to learn to see the positives in life, and not just the negatives.

We had a relationship based on a gender-oriented attraction. Now, the gender of one half is up in the air as it transitions form one to the other, and part of that puzzle has changed. Instead of getting upset and focusing on the fact that I am not being with someone of a specific gender, I chose to focus on the positive. We have a life we have built together over the past four years and our family and the home we have built together.

Instead of deciding to cut and run because of the loss of one part of the relationship, we chose to focus on the positives of what we have together and keep going at this relationship. What it comes down to is that love can overcome anything if you give it a chance. The old fable of Beauty and the Beast is more than just a romantic fairy tale, it is a historical reference to an idea that truly is as old as time.

While we may wish some days that love would be this awesome wonderful thing that you can’t get enough of, in reality, it is the hugging and kissing, the shared moments, the arguments, the all out fights, the bull shit, horse shit and any other shit you can think of and even all the little cutise things like watching them sleep and waking up in the middle of the night and feeling better because you can hear them breathing next to you.

This is why Love is.