Traditional wedding vows operate on a binary which cleaves to the idea that bad things are always bad and good things are always good. They enable a promise that points only to the blissfully good and tragically bad, glorifying painfully small points of light and dark within the human experience. While not an outright denial of the “grey areas” of love, these vows serve to reinforce an already too-prominent expectation that humans have for their love-lives: that the grey, mundane, daily task of living isn’t significant enough to pledge anything to.
But love cannot operate on a pendulum swing of lightness-to-darkness. Most of the time it bumbles about in a grey fog of car payments, mid-week Netflix binges, broken flower pots, and taking the cat to the vet. Love cannot operate on an exchange basis; love is not currency, it is not a bargain. If your love flinches uncomfortably at the idea of the radical self-transformation of a partner over the course of a relationship then perhaps it is not love but some strange utilitarian bondage ritual. There can be no give-and-take—only give, from all sides, angles, discomforts, and awkward half-smiles.
Most of the time it bumbles about in a grey fog of car payments, mid-week Netflix binges, broken flower pots, and taking the cat to the vet.
Love in partnership is not bound to the extremes of rich and poor, sickness and health, better or worse—most days it just is.
Here is a poem I wrote on September 2nd while thinking about the untamable greyness of loving:
I cannot undo love—
what is freely given cannot be asked for in return.
A hateful heart can only utter angry love,
biased and base.
What’s brewing hate in you?
Life is not worth holding onto anything
that blocks your cup from overflowing.
Real love grows in tending the simple, lonely, ugly things first:
There are scars and breaks and shrapnel in your own soul; reach in
and soothe them
with your own hands.
Take the intimacy you build with your own body
and let it leak gently out into the world.
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