There was a time in my life as a junior in high school where I had loved someone so deeply but never said anything and they didn’t either. The bond remained the closest friendship I’ve had to date. It’s not that I don’t have friends now who I love, but they have yet to reach that depth and I frankly don’t know if they have the capacity to.
It’s been more than 20 years and in this last few days I’ve deeply struggled as much as I deeply loved and I’ve realized I still miss that person, that love that I had never felt before or since.
I see others so happy with their spouses and although I know they don’t face their own relational problems, it’s heartbreaking and yet bittersweet at the same time because I am genuinely happy for them.
You see love is impossible to describe. Thousands upon thousands of poems, books, storie, songs and films have tried to covey it but in the end they all fall short. Love cannot be described, only felt. Yes there are attributes such as wanting to always be around them, go places, see and experience things together, laugh and cry together and yes, even be willing to admit and forgive and wrongdoings but these all are actions and aspects of a relationship; they are not the feelings themselves. There simply are not enough adjectives or even the proper words to describe it.
The love that never was haunts me more than any shadow of that love I felt in the following years with one individual in college. Then I fell into the trappings of what I thought was finally a love that rivaled that first only to be trapped, gaslighted, mentally and emotionally damaged in every single way possible for a decade. It left me so terribly broken and completely devoid of any sense of self, purpose or identity but in retrospect it did save me from a path that would’ve ended as they say “either dead or in jail”.
What is there to tell of earthly love? Nothing except it is as fleeting as a vapor, promises and temperamental enchantments both of which shatter as quickly as a priceless vase falls to the kitchen floor.
Many experience it differently but in the end it’s sliding down a grass hill in summer. Sweet smelling but downwards and short nonetheless.
I’ve more scars from love than violence and more often than not they were one and the same. Shall I tell you of these horror stories? No. It’s not worth the time or energy. It’s already down in paper anyways and my vocal cords are too raw to speak of it again.
So I’ll borrow from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in describing it:
MERCUTIO
True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes Even now the frozen bosom of the north, And, being anger’d, puffs away from thence, Turning his face to the dew-dropping south.
There’s little to add except that love is a folly’s pleasure, a game of dice, a toss of the coin. What’s more is that tempus fugit, and the only true love and hope is in the Eternal. The rest is a slow, all too aware of being buried alive a little more each day.
The best we can do is love those we can and point them to the One who is the only one able to show real agape love in the first place.
Its been 10 years since that relationship ended and 6 years since I’ve come back to Christ. But even His love is impossible to describe without pointing to His actions on Calvary. His records of being moved with great compassion such as when Lazarus died and as it says, “Jesus wept”.
The problem with love here on earth is that it can only be understood through our interactions with others. Be they family, friends, communities and even spouses.
We know God loves us, even when we can’t feel it but feeling His love is different for each person as much as is each of our own journeys in this life.
What then are we to do when told He loves us? When we are told to return to our first love? But it’s not the first person we were in love with but God who loved us before we were even born, who loved us before we even acknowledged His existence, or decided to accept this love in and of itself.
Yes, we can refer to “The Four Loves” by C. S. Lewis as our closet description of love, but to experience it is an entirely different matter.
To understand love here on earth we must first understand pain. Our pain, His pain and the promise of one day, if we have accepted Christ, spending eternity in His love where there are no more tears, no more sorrow, only the fulfillment of ultimate love for which we lack the ability to fully comprehend this side of eternity.