Last night I saw Blue Valentine, a small but brilliantly realized little film about the disintegration of a young couple's marriage. The night before, I gave a toast at my sister's wedding, and admired the way she was beginning a road traveling with such positive energy and apparent love for her husband. Somewhere in the middle, I have a friend who is grappling with frustration, disappointment, and a possible pregnancy.
Sometimes it occurs to me that love lives on the head of a pin; it is a precarious speck of a thing, small and teetering, and if we look away, even for a brief instant, any number of variables will knock it down, or change it, or scar it. But for all its beauty in miniature, love is also grossly malformed and unwieldy, it is a terrible, messy lump of antimatter that was never intended to take well to pin-balancing. What a complex irony - this thing we chase, in some way at all moments, is so averse to being bottled or replicated or understood.
As irrational souls a second removed from cave days, humans are destined to live in a Blue Valentine kind of world - a world where love offers increasingly diminishing returns. Love is an ant, and will carry a tremendous load, but even an ant cannot power on forever.
If I sound a bit down on love, you aren't reading the full breadth of my experiences - of the past weekend, yes, but certainly of the roadmap my personal adventures have closely followed. Love is incredible; it is a white hot jolt of ginseng and taurine and propane and combustibles, packed dense and rocketed into space. Love is the daughter of hope and its diaphanous existence allows us to work and thrive in hostile territory. I'm sold on love. It's just, I am positively and equally as sold on the disappointments of love's creeping negative spaces.
I worry. I am a born worrier, and my bouts of intense brow-squeezing are strangely punctuated by languid moments of zen calm. That's the coin, two sides. In Blue Valentine, we see both sides, a relationship formed and then lost. At a wedding, we see the joyous heads over tails, and hope (that eternal Mother) these young people have the strength to not be consumed by those diminishing returns. Some people are so strong, their legs are not swayed by the tide. My friend, his frustrations may subsume him, but he will move, at some point, somewhere, to begin again. To start looking for love, understanding full well that on the battlefield, mines are the tiny moments that pile up over a lifetime.
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