iThink...thereFore, iAm

There’s something about being with someone that changes your life. I’m not talking about completely - that’s an extreme that Hollywood has promoted. You won’t get someone into your life that will swing things around and everything will suddenly be “fixed”.

But your life will change. You will watch out for her feelings, think about her thoughts, and swing your schedule around for her. You will have to deal with the presence, whether emotional or physical or mental, of another person in your life, and you’ll want to be placed the same way in hers. You’ll make an effort to move things around so she’s taken care of, and sometimes you won’t know if these efforts are noticed, but you’ll do them anyway.

Your life will also change in another aspect - the other romantic extreme is that the person will love you for everything you are, including your faults, and be totally ok with this. Again, this only happens in Hollywood - we are all imperfect people, and we have flaws and habits that may irritate the shit out of the other person. She will have these, and you definitely have them too. But there is a truth in the propogated extreme: you will still love her regardless of her flaws. And she will love you too. And that is why both of you will slowly change over time to fit each other, not purely to suit each other only, but because the ultimate love wants the other person to be a better person than he or she already is, to fulfill their full potential.

It is because of this reason that the tearing of two people who were together, apart, sometimes hurts deeply and sometimes takes a long time to recover. But emotions that are too positive or too negative on something that has passed on can only damage the next. What is defined as “too much” is often not up to you either.

But it also for this reason that when you meet that person who will spend the rest of your life with you, and you both know it, that the magic happens. This isn’t the “time slows down and the surroundings blur out as the camera focuses on his/her gaze as the eyes widen” magic that we see on the screen. This is a slow magic - far slower than making something appear in your hands or pulling a rabbit out of hat. This magic happens over months, years, and one day you will look back with the other person and think that so much has transpired. “How silly we were!” you’ll say. “We probably didn’t know any better” she’ll tell you. And you’ll both marvel at how far the both of you have come since the first coffee together, the first movie, the first time you held hands or the first kiss.

There’s something about two people coming together that makes it both an effort and a joy. “Love is hard work,” proclaims Ravi Zacharias; and though hard work it may or may not be, there is always a joy behind it akin to that of a success after a long series of trials. The exhilaration of the gold medal after years of training, the pinning of the flag on the peak of a mountain after months of climbing. Sometimes that’s what you look out for, that’s what you focus on, because in the climbing of a mountain face if all you look at is right in front of you, all you’re ever going to see is hard solid rock after hard solid rock, and the occasional clump of grass or chunk of ice. Instead, you try to think about the flag you’re carrying and envision it flying with the winds at the peak of the mountain, saying that you’ve done it. If you’ve ever won a gold medal before (which i have) the feeling is awesome, but I think it won’t even come close to the joy.

There’s something about two people coming together indeed. :)