The more life I experience, the more I realize that love’s splendor can be a “many different” thing. Meaning, the love you feel for one person can differ greatly from the love you feel for another. I don’t mean the obvious, elementary differences between “I love my mommy” and “I love my best friend” and “I love my puppy dog.” I mean the I-thought-I-was-grown-up-now flavors of romantic love can vary pretty widely relative to the object of your affection. I used to believe that the more self-aware you became, the deeper and more deliberate love felt. Or, the more feelings like “I-will-die-without-this-person” were upgraded to emotions like “I feel sure” and “this is long-term.” I’m learning though that that thought, like so many other thoughts of which I’ve been certain, was also open to debate. I still believe love, like most other emotions, matures as one develops; however I realize it’s not the precisely linear growth that I’d once thought it was.
I have a book which matches, birthday by birthday, how compatible people are for different types of relationships based on their astrological sign. Each pairing is given a general theme, such as “The Most Perfect Union Ever” or “Ideal Family Bonds” or “The Worst Mistake You’ll Ever Make.” One of my former relationships bore the title, “The Miracle of Manifestation.” A line from the description of the relationship exclaimed that the miracle of the union was the joy at each of us finding the other. My repetition of the line did not do it justice just now; but I can say that I have never had the feelings of a relationship described more perfectly. Not only did I love my lover in that liaison, I loved the love I felt. I loved the love we felt. I loved the special strangeness we shared. I felt as though I’d found a lost, forgotten part of my family; this love was someone made me whole. I loved like a joyful idiot. Even in the face of massive shortcomings and imperfections, this relationship was blindingly beautiful in my eyes. I still consider myself lucky to have lived it.
A friend once asked me to describe my feelings about another relationship. I fought against using the term “just know” to explain how I felt, but think I lost that battle. I’m sure I answered with words like: “what I feel is so strong that I . . . . we just know.” It’s so difficult to describe the state of “just knowing” in more elegant terms. Faerie tales and poems and romance novels prepare us with the flowery language of passionate love. We can blather for several minutes about undying, eternal, sensual, sexual, passionate, burning, yearning, enduring, all-consuming, dragon-slaying flames of romantic love without repeating a cliché. But when it comes to detailing the soft, peaceful, warm-in-the-tummy, sound-and-sweet-in-the-mind feelings of “just knowing,” we’re lost. Maybe “just knowing” contains no drama and therefore gets overlooked the way a ‘good child’ often does when there exists a hell-raising sibling. But to me, that’s the secret treasure of “just knowing” in the depth of your bones that a relationship is constructive and secure. A warm-tummy, thorough relationship lives like a quiet, glowing secret; it’s elusive, indescribable beauty is shared more intimately than a soap-opera drama.
Then, there is an unexpected type of love that steals in and takes over your day. This is a love that occurs in spite of you, a love that surprises you the more it unfurls. I felt a love like this once, but unfortunately I am not good at being surprised. In my experience, feelings of intrigue and affection would pop up like a jack-in-the-box then bob in front of me with colorful, childlike expectancy. I would do my best to ignore them, hoping this would cause them to either disappear entirely or at least pack themselves back up under the lid from whence they’d sprung. I simply didn’t know what else to do with the emotions for which I had not planned nor made space in my life. I couldn’t even examine them long enough to determine if they were truly snippets of love, or possibly something less strong or more fleeting.
These un-expectations, though, affected me enough to carve through my tendency toward oblivion. I remember conversations beginning with typical triviality: conversations necessary to the flow of the day but intended to leave no lasting impact. Then without warning, a thoughts/ideas/random words would be shared and I’d nearly feel the world stop turning for a moment. “What did you just say?” I’d ask, giving the world an attempt to resume its spin and brush the moment away. But invariably the thought/idea/word would get repeated, reinforcing the sensation of having been shaken by my shoulders and commanded to Pay Attention to What Was In Front Of Me. As I said, though, I don’t handle surprise well. My go-to strategy is to carry on with business as normal. I dislike it when this strategy does not work. Therefore, in the moment what I felt most often was an uncomfortable fear. In hindsight, though, I remember these interactions as small gifts, unpredicted but lovely embellishments.