What's Love Gotta Do With It?

A lot of my notes will make reference to popular culture in form of title and\or subject.

Tina Turner asked the famous question "What's love got to do with it?"
And really... what's love got to do with relationships? The thing no one ever seems to tell you is...what next?! I mean we do the boy meets girl, they fall in love, get married (hopefully), have d 2.4 kids, then...? What's the next stage in your joint evolution? Is marriage or togetherness the optimum stage in a relationship? Is there more to life than that? Do you forget "I" totally because you're now a "We"?

Many relationships crash not because love isn't there, but because they have a preconceived notion concerning what love can achieve. Love might move mountains, but it doesn't take the place of the good old fashioned elbow grease required to make a relationship work. It's not everyday you like the person you love, hell most days it's a pure real-hate-tionship. There's nothing right about your partner then. What love does is remind you that there's something you did like about them to begin with, and help you tolerate them for that day.

Love isn't blind, it's tolerant, there's a big difference between the two. Tolerance means 'I see your faults but I can live with them and accept your imperfections. Blindness means 'I can't see f**k all!'

Love doesn't make it all better and doesn't solve all problems. Love helps you make compromises. Love is long suffering, i.e. patient, it's empathic i.e it allows you put yourself in the other person's shoes. It definitely ain't selfish. But with all its virtues if one doesn't put in the work, have patience, maturity, commonsense, trust and possess a certain amount of stubborness, no matter the love, it won't work.
If I start building a house and stop at the foundation, will it build itself? I don't think so! I might have love in my home that's the foundation, but I sure need to have other fruit of the spirit too! Dealing with another person is always difficult... your orientations differ, your values might not always sync, as you grow changes are bound to take place, issues that were never on the table come up. Negotiation skills, compromise, maturity, and wisdom become the order of the day.

So...wise up, roll up your sleeves, do the work!

Originally Posted: Jan 18, 2009 Tweet It...You know you wanna