“Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
That was Shakespeare.
Back in 1640 A.D. Cyrano de Bergerac’s small French company of cadets were completely surrounded by Spanish soldiers as far as the eye can see in every direction during the Thirty Years War. Despite being under siege by a superior force, he still snuck out of his camp every night through miles of enemy territory, facing imminent death, all to just mail letters to his one true love.
Dante Alighieri descended, hand over fist, through the horrors of all nine circles of hell, climbing through purgatory, and then up into heaven itself to find his beloved Beatrice after only meeting her in life twice over a nine-year period. He was so taken by this woman that he faced demons, crawled over Satan himself, and even impossibly ascended into eternal paradise just to see her again.
I broke up with my first serious girlfriend because she played the Grateful Dead way too much. Phish too. And while she didn’t mind having body odor she felt it necessary to burn incense all the goddamn time and smudge the house we shared on Belmont, weekly. Smudging is burning sage to purify the place from evil spirits or some shit.
When I was way too young I married the complete wrong girl and four years later I went through a horrible divorce that sent me spiraling into a weird time in my life that included stripping for middle-aged German hausfraus at second-rate ski resorts in the Bavarian Alps. I went through women at a dizzying and even self-destructive pace. I had no idea what the hell I was doing and that’s because I had no idea what “love” was.
How could I? I still believed the poets.
“My love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis for object strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.”
-Andrew Marvell
Beautiful… for the 17th Century, but today we have a different definition. In fact, we have several definitions. Today love is an open door. Love is all you need. Love is a battlefield. Love makes the world go round. Can’t buy me love. Let your love flow. Keep on loving you. Can’t stop falling in love. I love a rainy night. I love rock and roll, but what’s love got to do with it? You’ve lost that lovin’ feeling. The power of love. A crazy little thing called love. Baby, I love your way. You’re gonna have to face it your addicted to love. When a man loves a woman. Whitney Houston will always love you and Meatloaf would do anything for love, but he won’t do that.
Beyonce and Jay Z are crazy in love.
“Looking so crazy in love’s,
Got me looking, got me looking so crazy in love.
Uh oh, uh oh, uh oh, oh no no.”
Recently, looking back, I’ve come to believe that the reason I had fucked up all my relationships earlier in my life wasn’t because of me, or any characters flaws I might have had, it was because love used to be a many splendored thing, but by the time I found it, it was, “Honey why don’t we get drunk and screw? I just bought a waterbed. It’s filled up for me and you.”
Love today according to Kanye West, in a song he wrote for his darling wife Kim Kardashian-West, is best expressed in the third stanza where he sings, “I wanna fuck you hard on the sink. After that, give you somethin’ to drink. Step back, can’t get spunk on the mink.”
So, Sean’s theory on love: love isn’t something you can have someone else define for you. It isn’t something you can define for yourself until you’ve experienced the best and worst parts of it. Today I’ve been with the right person for almost ten years and I find that love is a beautiful mental illness, a mental illness that you can share with those closest to you. Love is finding a way to not blame anyone for a shitty childhood. Love is a fifty-gallon barrel of kerosene. Love is the best reason to try and fail. Love is ignoring the fact that your biggest pet peeve in the world is someone leaving the top off the toothpaste tube allowing the toothpaste at the top to get all crusty and gross and not freaking out about it even after asking nicely twenty to thirty times that she put the cap back on after using it.
But that’s just my theory. Don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t come up with one yourself. It’s not your fault. Listen: kiss, hold, caress, talk, smell, sight, sound, touch, sex, fuck… all of these things we use to fall in love or express our love are both nouns and verbs. So is love itself. Everything we do or say to express love in a relationship has at least two meanings. No wonder none of us can figure this shit out. And the word has been used so much over time it’s turned into a joke. So, I’m sorry, but Shakespeare’s full of shit, if love is anything at all, it is most definitely Time’s fool.
