When you’re 29 and single, working a job you feel you never leave, and you look over your bank statement at the end of the month to see that your largest “elective” expense is coffee at Dunkin Donuts; it’s hard to believe in True Love.
It’s not that I don’t believe in Love. I do. I love my family, I love my friends, and I’d do anything for either one of them, and I know that they’d do the same for me. Both of my brothers are engaged to fantastic women, and I know that they love each other (heck, they’re willingly becoming part of our family.. that’s love right there).
For both of them, they just “Knew” when they found the women they’re currently getting ready to marry. Most of my cousins were the same way. My cousin Joe, after one of his first dates, went back to his apartment and told his roommate that he “Found the woman he was going to marry” before most people would even consider them to be “seriously” dating.
A few months after he started dating, my brother Kyle and I were having lunch and he was talking about his girlfriend, when he gets nervous and says that he’s starting to look for a ring. I think he took my surprise as confusion, and then started talking about how he knew it was crazy, how he knew they’d just started dating, but that he Knew. He said:
“She’s the type of women I’ve always wanted but never thought I could have, that I didn’t think existed until I met her.”
That’s the kind of love being 29 and single makes it hard to believe in.
I know it exists. I know that others have found it. But for every friend who has, I have friends stuck in abusive relationships. I have others who, at 29 have already been divorced. I have friends that go from relationship to relationship, their hearts getting broken each time, and the pieces aren’t all fitting together, and they question if they ever will.
I guess compared to that, I’m pretty lucky. I’ve had three “relationships” of any note, and none of them lasted more than two months and had years between them. Sure, I’ve had my heart broken, but not like someone who has to walk away from a life they built with someone. I’m still ignorant enough of reality to find myself wishing for that heartbreak, or at least the love that makes it possible.
For me, True Love was defined by the way my Grammy and Grandpop Hackman loved one another.
I don’t know how their love started. I can’t tell you if it was always perfect, but as they were real people, I can say that it most likely wasn’t because life isn’t perfect. But I can tell you that right up until my grandfather passed away, he still smiled when he held her hand.
I can tell you that when my grandmother was sick, he went shopping with her list and it said “beans” and he didn’t know what she meant. This was before they had things like cellphones, and he didn’t want to run all the way back for clarification, so he just bought one type of every kind of bean the store had.
To me, the love they shared was strongest in these little moments. I remember going to their house growing up, how my grandfather would stop talking whenever my grandmother started, and just listen. Sure, she’d interrupt him at times, and he might look at me and roll his eyes mischievously, but he never stopped her from talking.
I remember how he would go cook something on the grill, and he would always call my grandmother over to check to see if the meat was done. He didn’t need her to make sure it was safe. He loved that grill, and after a few decades I’m sure he knew what she’d like, but he always asked. He never said why, and I never asked, but I think it was because he liked hearing her say it was ready. He liked having her a part of everything, even things he loved, especially those things that he loved.
When my grandparents celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary, they told stories about how they worked together to build their bookstore, how my grandfather worked with a prison ministry for years and how the two of them helped found a church in Allentown.
One of the guests asked my Grandfather how they made it so long, why the marriage lasted. He replied that my grandmother had the hard part, that she had to be patient with him. All he had to do was learn two simple words:
“Yes Dear.”
In a world of romance novels, romantic comedies, and even “romance” options in video games, there’s this idea that you find out what you want in your “True Love” by dating, and breaking up with others, until finally you find someone who’s perfect for you, who doesn’t have the faults you’ve found in everyone before.
I don’t like this view, and not just because it means I’m still a long way off from finding that True Love. I’ve never said “I Love You” romantically to someone, which isn’t surprising considering how short my few relationships were. What’s more surprising is that I’ve only really thought this way about two women, both of whom I never got to date, and I didn’t tell them either. If I’m being really honest with myself, I think I only really felt it once.
I don’t like this idea because it assumes that we can’t know what we want in a partner until we’ve discovered what we don’t want. To a certain extent this is true. We need to realize that we don’t want someone who’s shallow, but do we really need to date a shallow person to know this? Do I need to date someone without a sense of humor to know that I want someone who I can get to laugh just as much as she makes me laugh?
But then, what is love? If it’s not a series of checkboxes you can only fill once you know their antonyms, what is it?
True Love Is a shattering of your preconceptions.
I think that feeling what my brothers and cousins felt is a big part of it. That “Knowing” that she’s the right one. Maybe they had a list of what they were looking for, maybe they didn’t. But when they met the women they eventually were going to marry, if they had a list, they threw it out, because she broke every expectation they had, made all of their “hard won” relationship experience useless because they were More. More than what they dreamed of, More than what they thought possible.
I have to believe that True Love is like that. It’s a shattering of your preconceptions. It’s the willingness to do something absolutely stupid in order to be with someone, all the while questioning why you’re doing it; but deciding you don’t care because their company is worth the cost.
I have to believe that True Love is still getting excited slipping your hand into hers, even after sixty years, that it’s smiling when he tells the same story for the hundredth time, and it’s letting her be a part of something she wouldn’t be interested in otherwise, and having her genuinely interested in those things, if not for the subject, then because they make you happy. It’s her involving you in her life, and you loving every minute, because it means you’ll get another chance to see her smile.
It’s going out on a date, but not caring where you go, the whole reason you’re going out is to spend time with her, and you don’t even mind it if the coffee gets cold, because conversation with her is worth it. It’s going out on your millionth date, just before your 50th wedding anniversary, and feeling the exact same way.
True love is finding someone who loves you exactly as you are, but who you want to be a better person when you’re with them, not because they expect it, but because you think they deserve to have the best version of you that you can be because you’re still trying to figure out why they like you in the first place and you don’t want to mess it up. Love is knowing this fear is irrational, even if your relationship isn’t perfect right then, because you know that they feel the same way about you.
I don’t know if I’ll ever experience that kind of love with someone who will feel the same towards me, but I know that I don’t want to accept anything less. I know that I can’t choose who I’m attracted to, and you can’t really say “I won’t date anyone but my true love” without sounding stupid.
But, I don’t want to date for the sake of dating. I don’t want to continue a relationship with anyone beyond when one of us knows that we don’t “Know.” I don’t want to be like Ted Mosby in How I Met Your Mother, going from relationship to relationship looking for true love because he hated being alone. I hate being alone too, and I know that I’ll have to get to know people in order to know if they’re the one, but unless she steps in front of me at Dunkin one morning, chances are I’ll call her “my friend” before I start to call her “My Love.”
Maybe it’s the hopeless romantic in me, but I want the fairytale. I want what my grandparents had, what I see in my parents, what I see with my brothers. As tired as I’m getting of waiting, that is something that’s worth waiting for.
Maybe this makes me naive. Maybe you’re reading this and saying “This guy has no idea what he’s talking about.” And maybe I don’t. I know love isn’t perfect. And that you’ll still fight, and argue. That people who love each other are also the best at hurting each other.. But love is knowing that she’s worth fighting for, knowing that she thinks you’re worth fighting for too. Maybe this makes me ignorant, but even if it does, I’d still choose to believe it.
One other thing I learned from my Grandfather about Love was the value of Patience, and Persistence. The first time he asked my grandmother out on a date, he walked up to her family’s door and asked her if she wanted to go out with him. Her reply? “I don’t think so.”
So he went home, came back another day, and asked again. And again. Eventually, she said yes. Then they had more than sixty years together.
Maybe there’s hope for me yet.
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