While dri­ving home after shop­ping at Tar­get and Marshall’s, I was lis­ten­ing to Colin Hay’s solo ven­ture, Man @ Work. I highly rec­om­mend it if you loved the 80s Aussie band, Men at Work. His acoustic ren­di­tion of Overkill and Land Down Under are absolutely sub­lime. One of the tracks is Love is Inno­cent. It led me to think about what a bad rap LOVE gets from the world. It’s not iso­lated to spe­cific locales. It sur­rounds us, but love isn’t to blame. Love is inno­cent! … Peo­ple? Not so much.

I resent the num­ber of times I’ve heard (per­son­ally and sec­ond hand) the phrase, ‘If you love me … ” What a hap­haz­ard, hor­rific means of abus­ing the one pure thing the world has to share! For one rea­son or another it is we humans who’ve per­verted the idea of love. It’s not a recent occur­ance, either. It’s as old as time. So, why is it so hard to put a lit­tle love in our hearts? Pride, per­haps? Fear? We’re all too often left say­ing, “love,look what you’ve done to me!”

Maybe Hol­ly­wood should be blamed. Love is sup­posed to be dif­fi­cult, right? No rela­tion­ship is worth hav­ing if you don’t have to fight tooth and nail for it … if you’re not giv­ing up some­thing, then there’s no live­li­ness, right? How could some­thing that comes so nat­u­rally and eas­ily be pas­sion­ate? In vir­tu­ally every movie where a roman­tic rela­tion­ship is involved, there is a major strug­gle for the cou­ple to come together … love is a bat­tle­field. It’s the dynamic that makes the movie worth watch­ing. We root for the under­dog and hope there will be a hap­pily ever after. It’s a movie. A script for which the actors to fol­low. I repeat: a movie! I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a script to fol­low with a direc­tor telling me how to deliver the lines.

The cat­a­lyst that brings me to the Hol­ly­wood inter­fer­ence ref­er­ence comes from a let­ter I read that was sent to a friend by a for­mer sig­nif­i­cant other. Had I not known bet­ter, I would have assumed it was retrieved from one of those form let­ter web­sites. It was Hol­ly­wood scripted cliche’ after cliche’. I seri­ously laughed when I needed to be more sym­pa­thetic. This isn’t the only inci­dent that has made me think this way. Time after time, I read about real life accounts of break ups, lis­ten to friends and co-workers talk about rela­tion­ships. I can’t help but cramp up men­tally when I’m try­ing to fig­ure out in which movie I saw their spe­cific sce­nar­ios. It’s nau­se­at­ing. Movies can help us gain insight about human nature, but we can’t live it by the script.

Love is love. We can’t explain it, but we make excuses for why we’ll never fall in love again. I’ll admit that I’ve declared myself a vic­tim of love numer­ous times. Momen­tar­ily, I would blame love itself for my angst. It’s so much eas­ier to push the blame off on some­thing we can’t taste, smell or touch. Once the tears stopped flow­ing, I could see my way through the gamut of red flags that lit­tered my sen­si­bil­i­ties and real­ize that incom­pat­i­bil­ity, dis­hon­esty, and/or tim­ing would be the culprit.

Love is in the air. It’s less than a week away from the big V-day. Nothin’ ’bout love makes sense, but when you just let go you’ll come to real­ize that all you need is love … love IS a many splen­doured thing.

This was orig­i­nally writ­ten on Feb­ru­ary 9, 2008. Upon read­ing it today, Feb­ru­ary 4, 2011, it dawned on me that it has song titles splat­tered within the sen­ti­ment. How clever of me, no? It also reminded me how much more cre­ative I use to be on my blog. Here’s to return­ing to the past to recap­ture what once was, my loves.