This Is Not A Love Song

I have been confused about love for most of my life.  I thought love was Richard Gere pulling up to your apartment with roses.  Or Ross and Rachel.  I thought love was the way I felt about the first boy I loved.  That crazy-making-high feeling that made time stop; Tom Cruise walking in and telling Rene Zellweger that she completed him.  Overwhelming passion; a la the banks of some lake in a rainstorm circa The Notebook. And don't get me wrong, all of that is great.  Passion is great, overwhelming giddiness is great.  Top of the Empire State Building scenes are great for Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.  Those are lovely moments.  I am just not interested in that kind of love anymore.  Maybe because I am older, maybe because I have had my share of exciting moments.....maybe a lot of things.  I don't really know what has changed.  I just know that at this point in my life, I wouldn't trade the kind of love I have found in the last few years for a million Buffy-and-Angel-have-sex-for-the-first-time-moments.

I think I got confused because real love looks a lot different than on TV.  Real love, at least the kind of love I have come to know, is of a darker, messier sort.  Real love happens not just between two people, two lovers if you will, but between two friends, between people you work with, between parents and children, between people and their pets.  In fact the two beings involved in the love equation don't really matter from what I can tell.  What matters is the depth of the commitment.  The no-matter-how-hard-this-gets-commitment that exists in the sacred space between the lives of two energy forces who have chosen each other. We don't often share pictures of this type of love.  It isn't really pretty or sweet.  It's not the type of thing we share on Facebook or Instagram with a cute hashtag or caption.  It's the hard shit.  

Real love is listening to your partners labored breathing and waking him up to give him morphine.  Real love is emptying the bedside commode while your partner recovers from surgery.  Real love is holding someones hand through their first AA meeting.  Then their second first AA meeting.  Real love sits at the jail and listens, without judgement, to the one hundredth relapse story; real love makes the heartbreaking decision to hospitalize or conserve, real love stands by while you make really bad life decisions because it is, after all, your life and real love does not give up on you ever.  Even when real love wants to.

Real love says with a smile: "It's ok Mommy, they had fun", when two mud and slime covered dogs jump into the back of the car, turning it into a scene from a landslide.  Real love looks like this:

As you try desperately to monitor an old dogs blood sugar.  And real love then sits with you on the floor of the vet's office when there just isn't anything left to do.  Real love lets go, and real love says Goodbye. Even when real love doesn't want to.

Real love looks at pictures of loves past and hopes for them every day joy.  Real love takes an entire day off to sit with you at a stupid board hearing in Sacramento.  Real love doesn't get mad when, for the third date night in a row, you go to bed at 7:30 because the day was fucking long and hard and you are tired.  Real love says it is enough to just wake up next to you because you don't feel like being touched.  The words of real love can not be found on a Hallmark card. It may not even end happily ever after.  It may be hard the whole time.  Hard and tiring and exceptionally painful.  They probably won't make movies about it, especially the kind that come out on Valentines Day. Because it isn't cute and it isn't soft.  

But. It. Is. Worth. It.

Because real love is the only real currency in life.  The rest of it?  The rest of the stuff we think about and get caught up in.  The money-things and the job-things, the petty upsets and the things we gossip about over coffee? Those things have no value what-so-ever.  They are distractions from the real stuff.  The hard stuff.  The love stuff.  Those are the things that disappear as soon as we are reminded that something or someone we really love may be lost. Or in need.  The things we set aside when the phone rings and we hear someone on the other end of the phone asking us to be there.  To come home.  To find bail money. To say something so we can get out of bed.  To help, because things got  fucked up.  Again.  Real love costs us the most BUT it is the only thing in the universe that gives us infinity more on its return.  It is, quite frankly, the only thing worthy of your time.  And mine.  

I hope you spend the rest of your time today and every day in the realm of real love.  I am.  The picture of it would look pretty ordinary. Two women, with one day off between them, cleaning out the filthy, muddy truck, together.  But it is the most exceptional thing.  In the world.