What's Love Got To Do With It?

Yesterday I was having a conversation about love. How do you know exactly what love is and what has it got to do with relationships. As women, we are drowning in everyone else perception of love and what it should be. Movies, romance novels, periodicals and girlfriends...share with us what love is and what is the correct way to be in love. The thing about it is, love is one of those things that never is the same from one heart to the next. How love resides with myself is different than how it resides within my best friend. There can be no judgement about love because we never truly know the full body of it, in each and every person...because it is different...kind of like the mood rings of the 60's. They used to sell these rings where the color would change depending on the mood of the wearer...what really was happening was the color was changing due to the chemistry and temperature of the wearer which was totally different for each individual.

I reflect back on where I learned about love...I grew up each and every day hearing my dad say "I love you" to my mother. My mother never said it back. Did she not love him...did he love her too much? Did he need her more than she needed him? Who knows...what I do know is these were my first templates. As a teenage girl I read every steaming romanitic novel in publication. I now knew that love has to be a 24/7 passionate, heated kind of love...lots of emotion...loves of highs and lows...hummmm didn't work out that way. Dating, I learned that love was for some, conditional....hummm was this how love was to be???

All the cues and sound bites of what love is...and in reality I find that love...is a risk and it is worth risking your heart for. That although the love of my life does not wake up every day and say...I love you...I see it when he cooks dinner. I see it when he outlines a safety plan for my travel. I see it in the way he extends himself in so many ways. He does not need me...he wants me, and that choice is love. It is conscious choice, not filter through what others idea of love is.

Love is like a mystery book, one that brings new chapters with each year we spend together. I never want to know it all...I never want to reach the last chapter...I want to savor each page.