You Don't Know What Love Is.

______________________________________

Question: If it isn’t love...why can’t I sleep? Why doesn’t food have the same savory flavor that it once had? Why am I brainstorming about baby names? Why do my arms yearn to wrap around the frame of another…

Answer: Probably because I’m restless, all of my friends have summer crushes, I want somebody to go to King’s Dominion with next week, and the last person I kissed (on the cheek-of course) was my 12 year old brother and I’m pretty sure he groaned in agony when he walked away.

Look. I’m not here to entertain you. This won’t be a warm and surreal fantasy-driven rant about the ins and outs of romance. I’m here to keep it all-the-way real. So many people, in my generation, will label their hot mess of a situation “love” without hesitation. And it’s nauseating because most of us haven’t tasted love and wouldn’t know what it was if it arrived in a UPS package with a description.

When it comes to the topic of love, I am a certified disaster. I promise. If I don’t get what I want, when I want it, from the person I asked for it…I throw a tantrum that causes flames to rise and bridges to fade to ash. I’m only 25 years old and though I don’t know a lot about love…I know that love isn’t impatient and demanding.

When I talk with my girlfriends about our “relationships”, I hear so many contradictions. We all claim to be so thoughtful, sacrificial, ideal, and perfect…but so many of our desires are petty and based upon temporary satisfaction.

The reality is: there have been many nights when I laid on the couch watching Love & Basketball or listening to that redundant list of slow jams on my iPod…wishing that someone would just knock on my front door, then get down on one knee, and propose. But, I realize now, that I never really wanted the responsibility of having a husband…I just wanted to cuddle.

(That’s the real-ist thing I ever wrote).

The idea of washing someone else’s clothes, cleaning the toilet 4x a week, discussing bills, and going to marriage counseling (which is inevitable in 2011) just makes me SICK. I don’t mean…emotionally uncomfortable. I mean…disgusted, dizzy, angry, overheated, confused, and bloated.

I am pretty sure that marriage is amazing. And that’s fine. But I am really not in the hurry that I once thought I was in because, when I get paid, I like to shop…for clothes… for myself. I would rather wake up in the middle of the night to randomly check Face Book than to heat up a baby bottle or grab the Tums from the medicine cabinet for my spouse.

We’re all in such a hurry to “love” somebody when we barely like ourselves. It’s amazing because my generation is rushing toward nothing. Over half of the marriages entered in to last year will end by 2015. That’s not opinion. Those are just the facts. And what I don’t understand is…why are we programmed to rush like this? When we are in healthy friendships that could eventually graduate to marriages…we (as women) start to obsessively map some timeline that we expect men to embrace and commit to immediately. When they don’t…all of our friends and female family members tell us to kick them to the curb because they are “playing games”. It’s…so…depressing to be an 80’s baby sometimes.

Because I don’t know what love is…and no one around me seems to know either.

I don’t know what to do about it…yet. But, trust me; I’m going to figure it out. If you have any suggestions…call me. I’ll probably be laying on the couch…watching Love & Basketball or listening to that same redundant play list of slow jams. And, even though I just wrote this entire declaration about our generation, I’ll still (secretly) be waiting for Prince Charming to drop by…so we can cuddle ;-)


NNL