Nobody can prepare you for the day you first experience real love. It hits you in a big wave – heavier than you’d expected, colder, more powerful, insistent; it almost knocks you off your feet, but you brace against it and keep your footing. The taste of it in your mouth, the physiological reaction to the other’s presence, the sharpness of focus: all of these things surprise and delight. There is an overwhelming sense that you have broken from reality and that you and your love are the only people in the universe; this thought is comforting. Your experience of each other is single-minded, razor sharp, intimately focused. You want to know and to be known at every level; boundaries and filters are not an option.
If this sounds like Hollywood crap or pulpy romance novel fodder to you, trust me, I understand. I’m talking about the type of love that we’ve all been promised, that we’ve seen on TV, about which many (many and much) better writers than I have extensively indited; the type of love that most of us don’t allow ourselves to believe in, lest we chase it forever and leave the world without having experienced it.
Turns out it’s a real thing, friends: the experience of becoming a single, integrated being; of completely surrendering to each other; of implicit support; of room to grow and to be; of anything being possible. It’s amazing and liberating and scary as hell and you spend a lot of time wondering how it could possibly be happening. You and your love do and say things that you might not have done or said before; you think things that seem like other people’s thoughts. You will think and without a hint of embarrassment say a thing that would have made you cringe – or actually physically strike its origin – in the past (as an excellent example, I give you the entirety of this post).
