Imagine to Remember

For many of us our adolescence and early adulthood are marked by our search for romantic love. Marriage yes, but only as a natural consequence of finding love, love always being the ultimate goal. And in a disturbing turn of events we now have the self-proclaimed experts who tell us we don’t need love, completely rejecting not just romantic love but all of the ties that bind us to others as mere agents of oppression. They would have you believe your individuality means you are beholden to no one and in turn no one is beholden to you. But it is still there in all our songs and stories, the search for love in all its forms, and especially the search for the one. The one who will finally give us that feeling of home, to be seen in our fullness, with all our contradictions, the one who can hold us up in a light that does not cast shadows and still deem us worthy of love and grace.

Our searches for love never quite fulfill the depth of our need, all our human relationships come close and maybe that’s all that can ever do to give us a glimpse of the love that is possible. I have found that romantic love is ultimately disappointing, once the novelty fades and the high wears off we are left with a painful truth, that before us is a very ordinary person complete with all their imperfections and pain. And that my dream of a love that would heal and expand was an unreasonable expectation to place another, and him me. I think sometimes the need to villainize, to brand someone as some kind narcissists or some other kind of villain, provides and us any easy explanation, complete with all the archetypes we have come to rely on to make sense of the world, the truth is much messier, that this human with all their limitations would have never been able to give you the love you ultimately seek. 

Others ultimately disappoint us because we seek in them what they cannot really provide, all our earthly relationships give us glimpses into the ultimate reality of love, so that we can maybe come to understand something of our own lack and yearning, because the only one who can really understand you is the One, and maybe what we really seek is divine love.