Love is complex. It’s everywhere. Like the constant stream of brightly coloured 24 hour news. It’s Hugh Grant stuttering through the same film role, countless times over. It’s if or how you wear yourself clambering to a crowded bar on payday Friday. It’s hours of agony staring at the two blue ticks screaming silently at you waiting to see an italic typing… It’s the feeling in your legs when you see it. It’s constant reassurance that you’ll never leave. Or it’s asking them to promise they never will. It’s the hoards of gifts seamlessly towering like a competitive game of Jenga. And it’s asserting every piece of your puzzle directly on top of theirs because Coldplay told you it might just fit. And only they understand.
Or it’s not.
Maybe it’s us. Maybe we are the complexities, complicating one of life’s simplicities with our own experiences and narratives. To reject fear, and choose love – a popular refrain; many believe that these are two of human beings’ primal instincts and that we cannot feel the two at the same time. Without a degree of psychological training I don’t feel comfortable pronouncing this as universal. However, I do sense a change in my soul.
I used to live in the top paragraph. Like waves of vast emotion crashing against my metaphoric coastline. I remember an evening dinner riddled in the fear of not loving enough and needing even more. Tears at the table, and I mean remembering the scales back then, it wasn’t Mum’s cooking! I remember planting a foot through the floorboards, accompanying a likely cry of ‘you don’t understand’ or something similarly adolescent.
I’ve complicated friendships, relationships, and the mirror all in how I understood love to be. A negotiation as opposed to a commitment, a job description rather than a feeling subscription. Maybe that last line’s a tad too much of an application of my GCSE learnt linguistic devices.
As a songwriter, many of my mentors have always talked about the importance of being able to strip back to basics. Melody and lyrics. The foundations. Building your rhythms, instrumental hooks and the perfect mix is how you build the house. It quite often sounds better with the full band, but the song remains the same whatever its production. What if that’s what love is? A foundational decision to trust that the choice to be in it and receive it remains the same even at its most bare. Melody and lyrics.
An all encompassing love isn’t how many times you text, or how they reply. It isn’t how much net profit was received at Christmas. And it isn’t stepping into it wondering when or if, or even how it might end someday. It’s just turning up everyday remembering ‘I do’, and knowing you are. A reflection. A choice. A receiving. Right until the end. It’s fragile, and it can be very painful but neither are reasons to be afraid. A wise woman once said “today’s the day you worried about yesterday, and all is well.” A perfect love casts out all fear.
To dare to love is to dare to lose. But when life throws us losses, I’d rather have them winning.
Love is simple. It’s the step father offering to fill up the car so you can care for the man who’s name you share from birth. It’s the toddler, pressed up against your face in the bathroom as you caress the porcelain perch proclaiming; “Got these sweeties right here. 3 for you. Me have 1”. It’s the ex-wife preparing an emergency food parcel for the temporary cat resident you’ve taken in at short notice. It’s the swathes of local folk scrolling their emoji’s to find the praying hands on the church prayer page. They don’t know you, but they’ll do it anyway. And it’s the coach who measures your waistline weekly, swapping helping you hold your dumbbell press for a personal best for teary tissues. These things. This week. Love without measure. Look out for it, it’s everywhere.
It’s Joel, actually. 