A Lecture Hall Aphorism

My professor said something along the lines of:

We’re taught that love, at least “real love” is unconditional. If you really love someone, no matter how low they or you get, you are supposed to love them. We’re also taught that within that “unconditional love” is a clause that suggests when we really love them, we love them all of the time and there are never moments in which we do not love them. And that is simply just not true. Actually, that’s impossible.

I didn’t think much into this little lecture hall aphorism beyond nodding my head and thinking, “yeah people I love really piss me off.” The realization and perhaps the real implication of that lesson from my professor came this week.

Sometimes you fight with your family and sometimes you fight with your friends. Sometimes it’s you throwing a (in retrospect not-so) witty retort at your sister up the stairs only to receive an ample glare from your mother. Other times, it’s about something that matters.

You can swear they broke your trust. You can swear “that’s not what a real friend does.” You can swear “This is the last straw.” You can swear “We’re not talking again.” You can swear up and down and cross your heart and point your finger above your head and raise your palm flat before you. You can pound your fist on your desk when you tell your other friends and you can cry or you can be a stone-cold rock.

It is in these moments that my professor’s theory rang true. In those moments of fierce resentment and your roommate pretending not to notice the blood vessel demanding to pop through the skin on your forehead that you do not love that other person. And the thing is, that’s O.K.

The more important and implicit meaning (in my opinion) of my professor’s point–and maybe this is what those people who claim we always really actively love were getting at.

Those punctuated spans of loving are occasionally and abruptly ended with a misplaced period, a misplaced word, a misplaced action in the heat of the moment. But by loving the person at all in the first place, you open the door for the possibility of that moment being punctuated with a comma or a semicolon. Love allows you to finish your thought with the possibility of restarting it again.

Even in the times you stop loving for a brief moment, or three days, or a couple weeks, the cursor keeps blinking. You have time to finish your thought, to start a new thought, to remember what you forgot your train of thought was. You get to fall in love again.

We don’t love everyone all the time or even ever. But we are lucky enough to fall in love with our friends and family. Occasionally we fall out of love with our friends and family. But love means being able to talk, being able to grant space and be granted space. Most importantly, love means being able to forgive and be forgiven.

Unconditional love is not real. We fall in love. We fall out of love. But the funny nature of love is, it plants a comma in our hearts, allowing us to fall in love again. Love is not a continuous stream of doting and fairytale friendship. Love, thank goodness, isn’t a run-on sentence. Love is often underlined in green. Love is written in fragments with awkward punctuation interrupting a thought that was interrupted by something that got in your way. Love is full of dashes and semicolons and commas. Love is a fragmented and claused and a broken up language with half-realized thoughts ended unexpectedly.

But the important thing is that you can always pick up your sentence where it left off.

The important thing is that you can still read.

Love you, G.