recently, an old friend got married.
he courted her only after he obtained her parents’ permission, and their first kiss was at the altar.
* * *
we often chastise young boys and girls for only going through puppy love, and not knowing what “true love” is.
i have a feeling that they probably know, far better than most of us young adults, what love truly is.
because when you’re young and you don’t worry about money or relationship status or taxes or community property, you merely worry about the other person.
and it’s the little things, for the first time - the first time you held hands, or danced together (at an arm’s distance away), or when they waited for you after class - that seem to mean everything.
somewhere, sometime along the way as we got older, those little things started to mean less. they became more common, too overused. Love, as a term in itself, seems to be losing its meaning. it’s spit around like something rolling off your tongue too easily - too surface-level, too meaningless.
* * *
if you give pieces of your heart away so quickly and so easily, what do you have to give left to the person you eventually want to spend your whole life with?
* * *
it’s not about being pure or doing the “right” thing or even doing what feels good.
it’s about meaning what you say, being truthful.
it’s about taking back love - that cheap, shiny form of it we often settle for - and going back to the old, dusty antique form.
a form that’s not perfect, but that’s real.
a form that doesn’t distinguish between age, duration, amount, or even relationship - it’s just love. that’s all there is.
***
a father and a son.
and all their children.
