Guest Post: Untouched

Image: http://www.freewebs.com

My friend wrote this poem in the subway coming back from yet another date with yet another great guy who sounded really awesome but where things just didn't click. Sometimes I wonder what's worse--to have been in love, to have experienced its magic, but also the pain that comes with a broken heart? Or is it more painful to feel untouched by the great experience that is love?

I say I want to fall in love.

I want it all--the fairy tale ending, the tall dark and handsome (and intelligent and responsible and sensitive and progressive and successful) prince to sweep me off my feet. I want to hear romantic music in every thought, to think of my beloved with every heartbeat.To be thought of just as frequently. I want easy uncomplicated passion, long walks by the beach, shared goals and values. I want overflowing laughter, glittering eyes, holding hands, picture perfect moments. I want  to be one with another, to experience a harmonious union of two minds, bodies and souls. I want happily ever after, forever and for always, everlasting love, beauty and youth. I want to fall in love.

But I dream to be in love. 

To experience love as a verb that must be applied with full intentionality, human passion and vulnerability. To work on loving someone who is different than me. Someone who's not perfect--and for whom I'm not perfect--but who inspires me to think of perfection. I want the heartache and pain and disappointment that come when you care too much. The anger, the fights and the tears that mean you give a damn. I want to be faced with receding hairlines and growing waistlines. I even want to worry about looking too fat or too old for someone, because it means his opinion matters. I want the passionless routine everyday acts of washing dishes, changing diapers and paying mortgages with someone else. I want to communicate silently, through lowered lids and half gestures, with someone who knows me nearly as well as I think I do myself.