Love is a losing game
One of my very favourite lyricists and performers, Amy Winehouse, echoes a popular sentiment in her song “love is a losing game“. She writes it so well and sings it so emotionally that it certainly appears to be so. One must give in some space in their bed and, suddenly, one’s capacity to stretch with impunity has limitations. There is another to consider, another to acknowledge, another to mind… There is another not to hurt with our usual individual now almost selfish-feeling habits. But is it truly so?
The simplest of analogies?
Ms Winehouse herself of course meant the simplest of all analogies. Your heart, in getting entangled and enamoured relinquishes from your control and seems to change directors. Actually, when you think about it, did you ever truly own it ? I mean you, the mind, with all accumulated logic and wisdom, could you ever comprehend the heart or love? The world seems to have made it a custom to think that love cannot be LOVE without that red romantic stream, that stain of blood marking something new, legalising its coming to life, a most ancient requirement for divine creation and higher seal of approval, that something be lost and blood be shared in order that something may come to blessed existence and in this case, a union, no matter how succinct, be authorised and consecrated.
Is this love?
There are so many emotions that are easily confused with love, so much the feeling they leave within us resembles it. Our gratefulness towards the feelings they leave within us can at times be so overwhelming that we are ready to give our hearts away just to acknowledge and mark it, setting the sacrifice to almost force the birth. When you give up whom you are for whom you need to be, whatever the good reason you can invoke, it is called survival, a prerequisite of which is necessarily sacrifice. We do this in order to obtain what we are desperately after, be it to escape loneliness, to feel unforsaken, to procreate, to have a family, to give peace and reassurance to our loved ones, to tick the next box on the progress ladder guide, to feel passion, to experience the wonder… Whatever this is, and no matter how justified, it is definitely not love.
What’s love?
Love is no serious business of bloody tears and heartbreaking sacrifices. Life offers, on her own, enough moments to be serious, it doesn’t require our helping heart. Love is waking up in the morning in the same bed, as stretched as when on your own, with, inevitably, body parts dangling on the other, and complicity growing… Love is an extension of one’s freedom. What then do I make of the pain that follows separation? If that was not love, why does it hurt? 🙂 It has always amazed me that love is so tied to pain, loving to hurting and sacrifice. Separation hurts when it tends to put in question who we are, since for a lot of people, our relationship slowly begins to define who we are. So when the relationship ends, it becomes a personal matter. It is a judgement on us, on our capacity to love, to keep a partner, to be handsome or beautiful, to be enough… It is also the shock of the cold, the emptiness left beside and around us. Again, whatever it is, it is not about love, it is not love. The art of living is the ability to suck to its essence the jus of its benefits so that the compromises are never sacrifices and the losses feel like and turn out to be a gain. Love for another has to start before the metaphoric mirror, our own reflection. It allows us to free the other from becoming the person that gives us our worth and therefore from carrying the burden or debt of being compulsory in our lives.
Love in hope
So is my being single at the time of writing a testimony of my lack of faith in finding such a partner? I don’t think so. It’s the belief I have not yet found this person and will not settle for anyone else because as many compromises as life can bring or require, I will always try to not compromise myself. So, having made my point and very much believing in and applying it in my relationships, I turn on the music to listen to and lose myself for a moment in the voice and great lyrical style that I love, those of Amy Winehouse. Love might be, after all, a losing game…
*Love is a losing game, Amy Winehouse, 2007 http://www.amywinehouse.com/
