A Student of Love?

I was having a conversation with a friend recently and found myself speaking poorly of love.  I believe my exact words were “falling in love is a lot like being seasick.”  I went on at length about the nauseous panic that I associate with falling in love.  Days later I felt a tremendous sense of guilt.  What has love ever done to me that she deserves to be so ill-treated?  It’s true that I have been blind-sided by my own intimate attachments but can I really blame it all on love?  Is love some feral and vicious beast that lurks in the darkened doorways of my heart, waiting for that moment of soft vulnerability to pounce?  Is it really all that dramatic?  The short answer: fuck no - I can do love, in fact, I’m great at it!  I’ve fallen in love many times, with friends and lovers alike, and my heart is a beautiful mosaic of cracks and dents as a result.  Every time she breaks, she mends.  So if love isn’t the problem, what is?  When I don’t know where I’m going, I tend to look at where I’ve been so lately I’ve been wandering down a dark and twisty path - memory lane.  Just to be on the safe side, knowing full well the power of narrative causality, I’ve left myself a trail of bread crumbs!      
 
I’m a big fan of experiential learning.  Even as a small child I learned about the world around me by doing, much to my parents’ horror and now subsequent amusement.  Sometimes the lessons were incredibly simple like don’t touch things that are on fire, don’t approach large dogs at face level with a big stick in your hand, and my personal fave – despite appearances, fibreglass is not as much fun as cotton candy.  As I look back on my romantic history, this lovely tangled mess of misdirected passions and glorious accidents, I realise that I have maintained that same ‘what happens if I do this?’ style of learning in my love life.  Exhibit A:  In my early twenties I fell madly in love with a swaggering cowboy.  He was charming and sexy.  He was a great dancer, an attentive lover and drove a vintage car.  He told me that he lived with his ex and their son but they were no longer together.  Oh yes, you know what’s coming… he was married.  It was a quick and painful lesson, much like the one I learned when I was six and thought I could use my mattress like a trampoline if I jumped onto it off of a ladder.  I knocked out a tooth.  Lesson learned – look, and I mean really look, before you leap. 
 
Thankfully not all of my lessons in love have been so painful.  In fact many have been an absolute delight.  Shortly after the romantic train wreck known as Exhibit A, I met a lovely and wild man who opened up my creative world.  He was a good deal older than me, had a mile-wide streak of artistic genius and a penchant for cheap wine in excess.  It was a romantic friendship of epic proportions!  Together we immersed ourselves in loving creative play.  We wrote songs and recorded them in a makeshift studio in his apartment.  I danced in buckets of grapes to make wine to add to his unique collection of home-brew.  We read and wrote and played together.  I was his little folk-singer and he was a wellspring of inspiration in my life for some time.  The lesson was learning how to love and let go.  Ultimately, despite our mutual affection and adoration, we weren’t meant to be lovers and eventually went our separate ways.  It was a bittersweet parting but it was done with care and grace – learning that has served me well in all my relationships since.           
 
After a few more brief encounters and love affairs gone wrong, I found myself in a long-term relationship that brought a whole new set of lessons into my life - the most profound and challenging of which was loving without losing myself.  I’m still working on it.  So is love the problem?  Certainly not.  Perspective is everything.  Looking back, I have been blessed.  Every relationship has brought some measure of learning into my life and I try to be a quick study.  I have no right to sully love’s good name.  She can be a fickle bitch but she’s been a good teacher and despite all the wounds that I’ve incurred over the years, I definitely get an A for effort.