Forever, Always, and Sweet Nothings
by There is a time for realism and a time for a little blind faith. I think, in relationships, there is room for both.
I have been thinking of forever, of endings, and of change.
I am not afraid of change. Change is good. It leads to new situations, friends, opportunities and adventures. It is not change itself that scares me. It is endings that frighten me.
Everything is temporary. Monuments wear away to dust, civilizations crumble and fall, and people die. It isn’t hard then, not to see the temporariness of such things as love and relationships. Even during a wedding, the most romantic of ceremonies, we add a disclaimer to the certainty of the contract. “Till death do we part,” we say, acknowledging that this will end; that even love itself cannot last forever. It is absolute fact that while nothing physical can truly be destroyed, only changed in form, nothing ever lasts forever. Everything is temporary. There is no forever.
This is absolute. But it is absolutely not something I want to acknowledge when being held close by the one I love. What is love but a combination of mutual affection and respect mixed with a little bit of blind faith? There is no absolute in love. Yet we claim to love and be loved. We learn to say “I love you.” Sometimes easily, sometimes with great effort. We are, in effect, spitting in the face of absolute, using a word that can never be truly completely defined.
So we use the word, determined to get as close as we can to some indefinite definition simply because there is no absolute. No black and white. But we take these shades of emotional grey and if they are black enough or white enough, we consider it close enough to give it a name and call it as we see or feel it.
Why then can we not just say forever, because how absolute is forever anyway? Should we limit our use of the concept to the length of our own lives and refuse to say forever because we know that nothing in our lives could ever truly be forever? Is it such a terrible thing to whisper the word in a lover’s ear simply because there is no absolute forever?
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