Meerkat Prompts: Love
As we near the heavily-commercialised-yet-also-widely-celebrated 14th of February, traditionally Valentine’s Day, it feels appropriate to talk about that particular four letter word, love.
Countless books, movies, songs, poems, paintings, and other forms of art have been devoted to love. Philosophers have dedicated essays and sonnets to the subject. It is a emotion that moves us all, but though we all experience love, it still manages to feel like a mystery. Love encompasses so many other thoughts and feelings, and this meerkat regards it as the fountain from which other emotions spring. Love inspires joy, wonder, fear, anger, regret, guilt, passion, and simple, easy happiness. Love brings comfort and satisfaction, especially with the passage of time.
It is also true what they say about falling in love. You really do fall. There is a dizzying time, often a passionate time, where you cannot get enough of your new partner. You want to spend every waking moment with them. Your heart flutters at the sound of their voice, each smile makes you giddy with delight, and you are utterly lost to your feelings, they control you. There isn’t much you can do, other than surrender to it. As time goes by, this crazy period settles down, and if you are left with that sense of peace, serenity if you will, where the presence of that other person is a soothing balm, then you know, absolutely beyond any shadow of a doubt, that you have found what you truly needed.
It is always worth noting that love does not run smoothly. As much as you can become besotted with someone, it is exceptionally rare that you will end up with the person who is absolutely best suited to you. Life is rarely, if ever, that straight-forward. In fact, life is usually anything but straight-forward, and the same applies to love. If you never expect to have a confrontation, a row, a problem, or any hiccups, then you have sadly been blinded by the idealised version of love from fairy-tales. Love only masks the flaws in others and ourselves, it does not remove them, though perhaps a better of way of looking at it is, it helps us to see past them. In fact, I definitely prefer that.
So, how do my wife and I express our love? I think it can be found in the simple ease we have when in each other’s company. We are perfectly comfortable with each other, which is the result of more than 20 years of being together. We have mutual interests, which consequently give us mutual activities. We have recently and poetically reaffirmed our love with matching tattoos, which tie into our shared love of Star Trek: and it so happens that affirmation is in the form of a word meaning ‘beloved’. I am still figuring out how to be a better husband, indeed a better man, but somehow, despite all my faults, she still sees the man she loves. I am forever grateful for that, and for her.
