Is Love Ever Enough…

The titling of this blog is already wrong. You see, I’d never grab pompoms and cheer on the side of love and blissful ignorance. As idealistic as I may be, I’ve never believed that love alone would be enough to sustain a relationship – but recently I’ve been forced to see differently. Bring it I say.

The rule books have been thrown out of the window, women are courting, sleeping around, dating and loving like men and men are relishing it – or are they?

I have a friend who has been positively whipped by the woman in his life. He used to have a long list of essential criterion to qualify a woman into his heart, his psyche, his love bed. Then he met lady love, let’s call her, Lolita. Lolita is a 21^st century woman, forward thinking, flirtatious, in control of her sexuality, beautiful, career focused and in a word, fabulous. She was also besotted with my friend. His love duly followed.

It was only a matter of time that love would strike his seemingly asexual, unfeeling heart. I know that sounds harsh, but he always struck me as the man that would flirt with the idea of love but never fall in love, he was a little bit too in love with himself to let anyone else in. As a friend, his vanity was hilarious, his transformation was even funnier (shocking and stupefying too).

 She no longer needed equal proportions in breasts and booty, she no longer needed a chopping board for abs, she didn’t need a manicure, she didn’t need a degree, she just needed to love him, as he was. She was “just a girl, looking at a boy, asking him to love her,” (thank you Notting Hill). He did.

I’ve often argued that we need to be complete to be our best selves in our relationships, so we’re not too reliant, not too needy, not high maintenance and ultimately not going to lose a guy in ten dates or less. (I never got that movie, why would anyone want to lose Matthew McConaughey if they had the chance to have him at all)? Anyway, I’ve always thought that we did our best to be complete so the flashing ‘vacant’ signs on our foreheads didn’t wreak of desperation and emptiness….then I was challenged to think differently.

Another (worse written relationship blog so don’t go searching for it) said that perhaps we had to be vulnerable to find love because that was when we were most likely to allow our figuratively naked selves out. Only then would we subject ourselves to the hurt, the heartache, the hysteria and the hyperboles of love.

My mate has completely mellowed, he’s been stripped of his bravado (*except when speaking about how he would protect her, in which case he is a stoic handsome , muscular Greek godlike soldier on a white horse – he  practically becomes Old Spice guy). Feminists please do not go comment crazy, speaking about how women do not need to be rescued. They certainly don’t. This is not a fairytale but if I’m going to be in a relationship I want to know that my man is a man who can pull his weight ,uplift me when I’m down and tell me I’m beautiful daily (or else what’s the point – I’ll make exceptions for the latter point…maybe).

The above was true for my mate. His heart was incomplete until completed by his woman and in having her love him, warts and all, he found happiness incomparable to anything he had experienced. He was thankful that of all the toads in all the town, she'd chosen him to be hers. He felt like a prince and placed her high above himself. She rescued his heart. Love was enough.

The same is true of another friend of mine. She is busily planning a wedding. She is a woman who has dreamt of her big day from the womb. She even dreamt this fiancée up and weeks later he manifested – something is to be said of her clairvoyant abilities but we’ll get to that later. I asked if she could dream me up partner but her premonitions weren’t working that day (of course). Wedding planning is when the cookie cut relationship crumbles for many. Church or no church – white dress – red dress – reception – honeymoon – bridesmaids – dresses – flower girls – guests – invitations – bombonierres – the list is so long (and so well-rehearsed you’d think I’d done this before) and so tedious to work through that it’s bound to burst a few dream bubbles and potentially erupt into emotional lava that spills, boils, bubbles and destroys you dream day. Not so for my friend. In her blissful bridal mental waltz, she is happily dancing around her fiancée’s requests for a chance at true love. I think they call this compromise. Her level of compromise grew proportionately to the love she felt and the love she was given.

The man made the wait worth it. She is in love and at the moment it suffices. It is everything. It is all that matters. He filled her in a way she couldn't ask because before him, this love was unquantifiable and she was thankful for him and she would do her utmost to keep this joy (and this boy).

Love is so profound and when we have it we want to believe that that version of love is the greatest we can give and be given. Love needs to be enough because we invest so much of ourselves into it that for it not to be enough is an assault on our uninhibited expression of it. Charles Dickens said “men want to believe they are the first person to have ever loved their woman,” maybe even when we’ve dated others, you can be the first men to love us in the way that you do. Dickens continued to say “women want to be a man’s last romance,” easily fixed with a ring or a promise to commit. If all we are seeking is companionship and exclusivity, maybe love is all we need to complete us and then all of our petty criteria becomes just that…petty.