love is beyond butterflies and waterfalls
By: Ang Mga Liham
Tags: Mariel, Feelings, Angmgaliham, Love, Choices

over the course of living for 19 years, i am still navigating through life: its boring clichés, unexpected climax, and questionable plots — and recently, i’ve came to absorb that one idea that haunts me frequently.

“love is not all about the happy and the good, nor the butterflies and waterfalls”

as a kid who loved Disney films to the core, this is truly heartbreaking to know. i was always and is still amazed about how magical love is — about how it can transform a beast back as a man, how it can find the person destined for you just by the fit of a shoe, how it can awaken you just by one kiss, how it can free you by climbing up your high towers.

and because i am so idealistic, i romanticize these things, and might have overlooked what love truly is. we cannot and can never discredit the fact that love really gives us that happiness, that fleeting feeling, the butterflies, the waterfalls. but aside from that, it also gives us a choice.

i don’t know if you felt like a waterfall when you first felt that rush or that sting brought by love, but i did. it was in grade 5, yeah that early. and when we’re kids, we tend to fantasize things, right? i never felt butterflies, but i always feel like i’m a waterfall — just aggressively falling into something i wasn’t aware of, but it felt really familiar so i just went with the current.

Photo by Forest Simon on Unsplash

and that’s the thing, you see. we tend to rush into things, without exactly knowing them. we rush so easily that we often fall hard —

and for me, that’s just one of the many ways of love, being just magical.

anyway, rushing into things is not bad. we all have different ways of expressing our love and succumbing to it. but do these ways teach us the side of love that makes it harder to sustain?

for me, love is a choice too. i religiously believe that feelings do fade; that we could wake up one day and feel nothing — and i think that it is high time we consider it as one of the harshest part of this reality.

“The emotions associated with love — elation, anxiety, joy, fear — may come and go. But the motivation to be with the beloved — remains.”

Photo by Daniele Colucci on Unsplash

i do not know who said this quote, but it was written in our reviewers for Understanding the Self during my first semester as a first year student in college. imagine the affirmation i got when i read this! you know that feeling when you find the last, most perfect related study to support your thesis? well, that is just what i felt!

this quote basically suggests that all the feelings that we associate with love may fade, or even go, but the choice is upon us to stay with the person we love — and that just proves my point that love is a choice.

because if we come to think of it, when you base your love on a feeling, or on a sensation alone, should we consider it as love? there are so many different types of love, but what’s consistent about all of them is the choice we make to stay in love, to love, and to be loved.

there are times when love doesn’t really seem as an option. we can sometimes feel that it’s just making our life harder, and that we are better off with it. are we really sure about this? because last time i checked, love is the reason why we do the things we do. and i hope that by the time i become an adult, i may have the courage to choose love always, in all ways — and do things out of love.