I thought it was a simple question therefore I posed it. How many great loves are we given in a lifetime? I never thought that it would be such a confusing question and that I would receive such a multitude of answers from as many as we want to one to just not enough.
“You know, I am talking about loves, not jelly beans. “ I said. My friend defended her answer that we can have all the great loves we want we just move on when it doesn’t work out. I was baffled, “I’m talking GREAT LOVES, the kind that shakes you to your very soul.” She held her ground and I had to stop and think.
While most of us feel that we are only given one or two chances, she felt that it was limitless, and the more I thought about this the more I understood where she was coming from. As I talked about great loves with my other friends, I discovered that great is up for interpretation for one thing, and secondly so is love!
While we can love someone it doesn’t mean we’re IN love; and amazing sex does not love equal. The love we felt at 15 is not necessarily the love we feel later. How could it be? That is how I see it, but maybe I’ve been looking at it the wrong way. Maybe great love is a jar of jelly beans with an endless supply of flavors that we can grab and savor as we please and if we don’t like it, well, we just try another.
Maybe all the romance masters and poets had it all wrong. Emily Dickenson confined herself after her one great love didn’t last “forever”. Shakespeare wrote of the great tragedies of that one great love that meant life no longer had any meaning if living was without them. And, even in modern times, Nicolas Sparks writes with passion about the one great love that changes your whole world and nothing is ever quite the same.
I can’t help and wonder, in today’s modern world have women traded in our beautiful illusion of true love for a bag of Jelly Beans?
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