To each their own lessons in love.

People need to vent about love the way they need to vent about life.  On Friday, without solicitation, two coworkers told me about their heartaches and mishaps in relationships, about people who have mistreated them, and about how they mistreated themselves, and how they emerged from their painful pasts gracefully.  I am a sponge for other people’s lessons in love.

Despite Friday’s sharefest about relationships, and despite the fact that these were two completely separate conversations with different people (a mid-thirties male and a mid-forties female), they both had the same lesson to impart: Don’t marry the one you love; marry the one who loves you.  I don’t agree with that mentality, although I can’t argue with the personal lessons these people have extracted from their lifelong experience with relationships.  To each their own.

Unbeknownst to them, they both told me that the dynamics of every romantic relationship revolve around a party who is “more in love” and a party who “settles”.  Usually the one who is more in love is the doting and thoughtful one in the relationship, and this person is underappreciated and at times even mistreated by the one who settled for them.  I’ve heard this before, but to hear it now, at a point in my life when I seem to be analyzing relationships a lot, it makes me sad.  I’m aware that there are instances when people marry for personal gains, whether financial, social, or legal, but to say that people settle in relationships because they may be treated better if they possess the upper hand is painful to comprehend.  I would like to think that the most fruitful relationships are the ones where both parties love each other equally, but then again, how does one even begin to measure love?

It’s disheartening to think of all the people out there who merely settle for a partner they aren’t even truly in love with, and even more painful to think of those who aren’t truly loved.  Call me an idealist.  Call me a purist or a hopeless romantic, but I refuse to settle for a life partner who I’m not absolutely, wild and crazy, deeply and madly in love with… And my counterpart better feel the same way.