How To Dismantle A Nuclear Bomb . . . There comes a time in every relationship when one of you or both decide to go looking for a nuclear bomb. These strange explosive devices are relatively easy to find. Even if you can’t find one, you can make one up in an instant.
In love, there is always this diffuse uncertainty. The more you love and the stronger you love, the greater the risk that you will be hurt. You throw everything you have out there and trust that the other person will honour and respect your surrender to him or her. Love is a high-risk gamble. It is like stepping forward on the high wire above all the circus-crowd world, a tenuous balancing act that you dare to try, even when you know there is no net to break your fall, and even when you know you will surely fall.
If, for a moment, you are saying to yourself that love can be something strong and certain, if you are saying that love is steadfast and sure, then you have not loved with any passion and perhaps not at all. Love is neither certain or sure. Love is a chaos of so many emotions – hope and despair, trust and fear, joy and sorrow.
Some people say love completes you. Love does not complete anyone or anything. Love shows you how incomplete you are. It challenges you, frightens you, argues with you, and taunts you. It waits for you around a dark corner, and even when you turn that corner, you find it has slipped away to another dark corner. You can never know its face or form. It is the mystery of mysteries, indefinable and yet wonderful. Perhaps that is the secret to great love -- to cherish not what fits into your view of the world, but instead to acknowledge that this wondrous mystery exists beyond your reach and your understanding.
And still we look for nuclear bombs.
What is it about happiness that torments us? Why are so many so unwilling to accept that love brings them the greatest joy and leave it at that?
Why do we confuse mystery with secrecy?
I never know why the doubt creeps into a relationship, but it does. We set traps, rummage through drawers, pockets, briefcases . . . We check for suspicious email, ask leading questions, even look at our best friends with a curious eye during a dinner party. We look for the nuclear bomb, and sure as hell is hot, we find it. Not only do we find it, we usually detonate it as well.
I think we need to end the arms race. Pat Benatar once sang, “Love is a battlefield.” She got it all wrong. Suspicion, doubt, anger, insecurity, all of these are what we battle. We cannot battle love. Love has no army, no fleet of ships tossing cruise missiles our way, no sacred land to protect or conquer. Love is that very first moment of peace that you feel when you fall into someone’s life. Love is not a battle. Love is a surrender.
Why can’t we just leave love alone . . . let it slip away around every dark corner? You don’t need to know what love is. You just need to know that it’s there. |
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