A Promise to Love is a Promise to Work

Ain’t love great?

It swells and swoons and sweeps you off your feet. When it comes it lifts you up over your problems, it sweeps away your issues and leaves your worries in the pile of life that now sits like a heap of laundry on the floor where you were standing, knee deep until this miracle made all of it fade so far into memory that it was like a dream.

Love is like that. It’s amazing. It is energizing and effortless at once.

Love isn’t static, however. It doesn’t stand still amidst storms. It doesn’t resist change and fly above all challenges. It bends and flexes. It is forced to learn and adapt. It’s formed in fire and the heat is increased until it learns to morph. Until it changes it’s molecular make up so it can be poured into the mold of your choosing. This fire can show your flaws in a way that will leave you carrying that first early version of love like an old and dirty T-Shirt you once thought you’d never take off, never have to mend or clean, back to the pile of discarded worries and concerns and issues you had thought you left behind. Other times it reveals strength and pliability that show you that it will never fail you so long as you never fail it.

You can fail at love by merely not trying. By not making an effort. It seems like an aspersion to say you didn’t try but it isn’t. Perhaps you didn’t understand. I didn’t. Not always. I thought it was a transformative thing. I thought once love found me I’d be swept up and out of my problems. That drinking myself to sleep would be a thing of the past. That bouts of self doubt and self-loathing would be replaced with a natural buzz that made me unconquerable and endlessly optimistic. I thought that because it did that. Well, it did most of that most of the time. And for a good long time. Why wouldn’t it stay like that?

You see my wife is fairly hard not to love. I remember early on the ‘falling fast’ aspect of our relationship. I made promises in those early days that I had no idea were so important. I did it because I had to. Love was making me. It was making me tell her I loved her. It was making me commit to things I’d soon waiver on, but ultimately follow through on. It made me a better person through no real effort on my part. Because that love was passive. I merely received it. I heard it loud, acted on it’s suggestions and never questioned its wisdom.

Until I did. Until love became hard. Until love started to get drowned out by the baggage I brought. Baggage is a loaded term but some of it was actually just the essentials. The stuff I needed to carry with me to retain the essential me. I need to be occasionally high and often low. It makes my world have color. I need to feel like I stick out, like I’m different. I carried my sense of uniqueness through years of outwardly trying to fit in because no matter how hard I wanted to leave behind being unique it turns out it was really important to me and all the testing of that I could withstand would never scrub me of it. I needed to feel bedraggled and bewildered at life from time to time in order to know what was right and what was wrong. And I had to carry some of this luggage and my wife needed to help with the load. As I need to help with hers.

These were the promises we made to each other. Promises we had no idea were so important until they were tested. By time at first. Then by kids. Then by life and all it’s joys and pains. Promises we had no idea were so prescient and wise considering the impulses that led us to make them. Promises that challenged us, melted us and made us anew, stronger and more able for all they exposed. Promises we needed to fulfill to make and keep the promises we are now making to our kids that have tentacles and reach in directions we never would have predicted when we made them so confidently. Promises that would have crushed the people we were before we promised our love to each other. Before we had to live up to our promises not only to one another but to ourselves. Promises to love actively, to work at showing our love, to build a home where it could flourish and be tested and where it could fail and be recovered.

Thank goodness I allowed myself to be swept away so I could make the promises that would make me what I needed to become. So I could soar above it all without losing sight of why I am aloft and how I can sustain what has become the life I know I was meant to live. Before I could promise and know that it was unbreakable.

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This post was written in response to this prompt

Author: joejmedler

Joe Medler lives in New Jersey with his wife, who is universally understood to be far too good for him, and his two young sons, who are far too smart for him. His work has been featured on MamaLode, The Original Bunker Punks and Sammiches and Psych Meds. You can find more of his work at https://developingdad.com/ and follow him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/developingdad View all posts by joejmedler