Crazy Stupid Love.

Love. Since a very young age, I was taught by books, movies and film that love steals your breath and swoops you in a hurricane so intense that gravity is lost. I have wanted to find that love.

From a very early age, I developed an idea of a man. A soul mate. Someone strong and silent whose love for me is possessive, whose personality is stoic, except for me. Someone who could rip people apart with his hands if my life were threatened but whose hands on my person are rough only in passion (I don’t know what I’m doing that my life is in danger in this scenario).

Tales of Burning Love. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. Captain von Trapp and Maria. Lester Young and Billie Holiday. The Sons of Anarchy love. Peaky Blinders. The Lover. Last of the Mohicans. Every single Harlequin. Love so intense it burns to the point of incineration. 

Unrequited love in any media makes me physically ill. I had to read the episodes of Sons of Anarchy to be able to handle the relationship between Tara and Jax. I couldn’t even watch the majority of the seasons because of what they went through. Forget about her murder scene. I had to watch that in fast forward and read about it on Wikipedia.

After falling in love, falling out of love but getting married anyway, gaining 70 pounds of boredom and misery, and, finally, getting divorced, my idea of love has grown into something much more scientific.

The logical side of me, feels that we have chemistry based on attraction which could relate to pheromones or another tricky way to identify that this other person could raise healthy children with us. I believe the reason marriages don’t last is the chemistry doesn’t make for a healthy life-long partnership. To my friends who care to get married and haven’t yet, I implore them to believe that marriage isn’t what they think it is. The wedding is. But the marriage is a life long lease you sign with someone, and who wants a permament roommate?

Every man I meet with whom I have chemistry disappoints me. He doesn't feel like the one. I can’t help it. The kind of love I want probably burns fast. Probably involves drugs and physical violence. Cheating and heartache.

What I wish is that the man that I’m waiting for isn’t someone fictional-a composite of fiction. I’m wishing that like the horse came before the cart...the true burning love came before the stories. That although it is rare, there exists perfect, deep and passionate consuming love between two people, and in one of our lifetimes, we find it. Or maybe we touch it in each lifetime, but only in one do we get to exist together.

I wish this. 

Only a small, tiny party of me is holding my breath. 

To be very honest, I have been loved in this way. My mother, who died just five weeks ago today, she loved me so much there was no gravity for her. There was no up or down, or right or left. She loved me in a way that burned. I couldn’t always receive it. Now that it’s gone, I feel its absence like coldness in my heart.

There are a million forms of love, true love, soul mates, and they manifest in more than our lovers. They manifest more in our not lovers. 

Is there any fact behind the true love from all the great romances I've swallowed whole over the decades? I don't know. But I wish, I really wish, that if I can be loved that deeply by a lover, that it happens before I need lube. I am almost 40.