Geometric Love

Love is illogical. It's not a feeling that anyone ever describes quite the same, you cannot weigh it, you cannot see it physically, only in action. It's easier to see over time than in an instant, it has no taste or smell. You cannot touch it. But you can feel it. And I was thinking about if it was possible to turn love into something logical. I was stuck, thinking that it might just be an idea until I looked at a piece of graph paper. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks.

Most relationships, I've observed, are like perpendicular lines. They meet at a point and everything converges and for a time, they are one, they are a whole and everything goes together. But then the lines of their lives continue and they go apart from each other, growing further away from each other with each passing moment.

That sucks. I don't want anything like that in my life. I hate the friendships I've had like that, I've despised when that happens in a romantic relationship. I tend to out love other people and I get destroyed so easily. If I weren't such a lover, I would have said "fuck this shit" long ago and joined a monastery. I've had the example of my grandparents to look at on how a relationship should work. 50+ years, four kids, a farm, and three states. They did the long distance thing for a while when he was in the Navy (very, very long distance), they opened and ran a business, built a home from the foundation and still managed to keep it together. Listening to them talk, you might wonder how they managed it. I know I have quite a bit growing up. But I realized that no matter what they've done, they've done it side by side. They're like parallel lines. They never intersect in the explosion of similarities that most relationships do, they go on, side by side, infinitely.

I want that. I want to say, "You there, heading that way, I'm going there too. You stay over there and you have your things that you like, that you do, that you visit and eat and listen to and enjoy and I'll keep mine over here. We can share our experiences, but you stay there and I'll stay here and together, we will go on forever, in the same direction." I want to take that space between the lines and fill them with our shared lives and experiences. I think maybe the reason people get into relationships that don't work is because they see that there is another line about to intersect them and it catches their attention for a fleeting moment. And all these lines form a grid, like graph paper on an acid trip.

But when you stop looking at what's happening on the side and you focus forward, you notice that there is someone headed in the same direction you are in life and from then on, you're with one another. I think that this is how it should be. Two people, next to each other for eternity. Parallel lines.