There has been a recurring reaction to my work that I usually address in three lines, and I have become so accustomed to the inefficiency of this small effort that it has become second nature to me, like those who manage to endure the discomfort of tight shoes rather than changing them.
This reaction is as follows:
“You’re talking nonsense, love is natural, everything should come from the heart, we shouldn’t have to make efforts, otherwise it means something is wrong and it’s just not the right one.” (I didn’t bother, I just copied and pasted a YouTube comment).
Many people misunderstand what love is. I have often seen men confuse it with a physical attraction mixed with an appeal for the image that the still unknown , whilst for woman the love that is represented in their eyes (the symbolic). However, experience has quickly contradicted this declarative love.
Love is not just passionate love, that state that lasts several months at the beginning of a relationship in which we feel a great energy and a cocktail of varied emotions: joy, longing, euphoria, worry, which makes this period more interesting than any amusement park.
In my opinion, love is a decision, a deliberate choice, to mobilize part of our energy for the other person. Two people who decide to have a lasting relationship, with their different personalities, different needs, different abilities (for example, to communicate), different expectations, and different tastes: all this generates friction and difficulties. Love is the choice to overcome these difficulties.
Many people see love as something that happens to them, that falls upon them, or a state in which they find themselves and which they have no control over . This is true for attraction, but very quickly we are faced with the choice of transforming this attraction into a relationship , either by making advances, proposals, or by accepting them. And so it is at every stage, one of the most critical moments occurs when passionate love ceases, and when we choose to continue loving a person, that we will continue to invest ourselves in, advancing the relationship and strengthening the bond, despite no longer being crazy about the other person on a daily basis and knowing the differences I mentioned which are a source of difficulties.
This choice can be made in both directions. In my life, I have met many passionately in love people who, for X or Y reasons (including different religions, long distances), have made the deliberate choice not to transform a feeling into a relationship. Conversely, we all have examples of couples who formed in the absence of a strong interest in one of the partners at the beginning. There is this choice to experiment and see how things will evolve.
We choose who we love, and then our actions make us love who we chose. If we do nothing, or rather if we decide to do nothing, there is no love. Love is a choice, and that is what makes it beautiful.
The word “effort” has a negative connotation with the notion of constraint, but in life, there are efforts that we enjoy making with the result being pleasant . Physical effort for millions of people is a source of well-being, the effort to cook a meal, the effort put into work when we love our job. The relationship indeed requires effort (ask young parents) in the sense that it is a mobilization. Most of the time, this flows naturally because it comes in the wake of a choice (commitment), but a little thing can make it burdensome, especially the stress of a difficult workday that can compromise what was supposed to as a couple be a pleasant evening. All this to say that a dangerous disillusionment awaits those who see the couple as a beautiful boat trip on the calm waters of some Swiss lake. Sometimes, the weather changes.
