Insomnia has a way of creeping up on you when you are in the most desperate need for sleep, and, with this uncalled for lack of it come the strangest thoughts into one’s head. During my latest affair with insomnia, the dominant thoughts that crowded my foggy brain were those of love…
"Love is a strange yet wonderful thing;
It can bring you down or make you sing!"
This was written on one of my old notebooks when I was still in school and, for some reason, it just stuck to my head and didn’t fade into the abyss of memory loss. Perhaps because it rings so true. Being in love can make you or break you; it can strengthen you or turn you into a miserable whining baby. But, the way I see it, it really shouldn’t make us miserable at all…
The reason love makes us miserable is the way we deal with it and what we expect from it. We spend half our lives looking for that special someone to share this wonderful experience with. Once that happens, we develop this unrealistic conception of how being in love will magically make our lives better. Sure, being in love makes us generally more stable and cheerful, but that’s as far as it goes really… The rest is totally up to us; we need to work on this love to make it survive. And we need to be a little selfish…
If you think of it, love is a selfish feeling to begin with. We love others because they make us happy, or because we feel comfortable around them, or because they give us the support we need to survive our days. And vice versa too; we are loved because we make the other person just a little more tolerant of the crazy lives we lead today. So, through this selfish perspective lies the secret to making love survive. If you are in love with someone who adds to your misery rather than make you a happier person, then you are doomed and, sadly, this is not love. Call it obsession, or fear of change, or just habit, but that’s definitely not love. The love I speak of today is the supporting leverage that helps you get up in the morning and helps you sleep better at night.
So, back to being selfish. By being selfish I mean thinking of the relationship in the term ‘us’ and not ‘him / her’. For love to survive and help us survive, it must give us satisfaction; it should be worth our while. This can only happen when our needs are met, and they won’t be met unless we put them out there and communicate them to our spouses. In doing so, we must be able to tell the difference between communicating our needs and making straight out crazy demands. Not only that, we must also be good receivers of words from our significant other. Sure, it hurts like hell when they say you haven’t been up to par, and our initial gut reaction to lash out and make excuses or explain our situation must be tamed. Wouldn’t you rather have someone you love tell you that you screwed up than someone you didn’t care that much for?
Why does it hurt more when we are critiqued by someone we love? Is it because we feel we let them down? Or are we just disappointed that even that person doesn’t think we are perfect just the way we are?
I guess what I’m trying to say is, after the preliminary stages where he takes your breathe away and makes your heart jump, you need to strengthen the bond between the two of you because, once the firey passion cools, that bond is your only chance at survival.
Enjoy and don’t linger is sadness or anger. Life’s too short…
But then again… Who am I do judge? I’m just sleepless and hallucinating…
