As Valentine's Day approaches (or as my good friend Sean likes to call it "Singles Appreciation Day" aka S.A.D.), my other darling friend Jen noticed that Hallmark now has a section of cards dedicated to, as they put it, "Troubled Relationships". Pessimistic sounding? Maybe. But also pure genius in my opinion. Let's be honest, hardly any of us have relationships that are smooth as glass and glide along amazingly all the time. For those of you that do...please stop reading -- this blog is decidedly for the emotionally troubled and wearily jaded only! I doubt unceasingly cheerful people can appreciate my life debacles-turned-into-OMFG-moments half as much as my lovely troubled-ish-twenty-something target audience. And I'm sure it's all you slightly blasé yet still intensely emotive persons who would also agree with me in saying that Facebook needs to add another relationship status options to the likes of "Boy, is it ever fucking complicated".
When we were younger, interactions with the opposite sex were much simpler in the sense that you liked someone, and you were with them without too much else to consider. Now that we're in our twenties, i.e. the decade where we're expected to effortlessly establish the rest of our lives, there's a whole slew of considerations added to the equation, including career, travel, opportunities, partying and all the details these options entail. Yet, somehow within these often hectic and fleeting years, some of us manage to slow down enough to fall in love. And that's where the real complications start to set in..
Before I had even been in love, I would always chat with my girlfriends or hear of stories where situations sounded, to my naive ears at least, ridiculous. Situations where couples who were in love let other factors stand in the way of being together and often even dated other people. I always vowed in my head never to become one of those girls who had a super-complicated relationship with some boy in another city, or some boy she just couldn't be with at that moment in time. Fast forward a couple years and I'm in my own insanely complicated situation with nothing but sympathy with all those girls of stories past. It is only with experience -- painstaking heart-withering experience, that I've learned how logic takes a backseat to love in many cases and what we should do, and what would make the most sense to do is what we do last. In my head, I know personally that being in love means being with a person and letting all other factors play second to that, but being with some one who is simply not consumed by love in the same way allows for the situation to become, well, complicated.
There's a saying I read somewhere recently which was something to the tune of "What we remember will be how well we loved, how well we lost and how well we learned to let go." It's learning to let go which seems to be a hard feat to conquer at this age. Perhaps it's because now is when most of us experience our first loves, magically pristine in their vulnerability, or perhaps it's because we're not mature enough to see the benefits of the bigger picture. However you put it, learning to simply let go and move on is the epitome of a situation easier said than done.
I guess I was hoping all my moaning and whining about being in love at such an age would come to some sort of tidy conclusion on the topic, or at least be a cathartic release in a way, but as it turns out there are no clean-cut answers when it comes to love, unless your emotional capabilities resemble that of a robot. (And trust me when I say I've met some boys who have come damn near close.) Complicated relationships, long-distance relationships, and being in love with the unlovable are all far from ideal situations to be in. But, let's face it, we wouldn't be in them if we didn't think, somewhere deep down buried beneath our jaded souls that at the end of the day, love is kinda, sorta, maybe, just a teensy bit worth being in a "Troubled Relationship' for.
x
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